Rafflesia Arnoldi.

Scarce engraving the Corpse Flower from Transactions of the Linnean Society of London.

The first botanist to find a specimen of a Rafflesia was the French explorer Louis Auguste Deschamps (1765-1842). He was a member of a French scientific expedition to Asia and the Pacific. During the expedition he spent three years on Java, where in 1797 he collected a specimen of what is now known as R. patma. During the return voyage in 1798, his ship was taken by the British, with whom France was at war, and all his papers and notes were confiscated. They did not see the light of day until 1954 when they were rediscovered in the Natural History Museum, London. William Jack (1795-1822) who was Arnold’s successor in Sumatra, being aware that Deschamps, despite his loss of notes, could formally publish a name for the newly discovered genus at any moment, rushed to draft a description to ensure the credit went to a British botanist. This draft description was held in readiness, in case there was word that the French were about to publish, whilst waiting for the British Museum to produce a better-prepared version. The generic name, Rafflesia (given in honour of Sir Raffles), proposed by Brown (who had originally wanted to call it Arnoldii) after Joseph Arnold, was validated by S.F. Gray in his report of the June 1820 meeting of the Linnean Society of London, as published in the Annals of Philosophy in September that year. While the species Rafflesia arnoldii was officially described for the first time in 1821 by Brown, so that Arnold was commemorated after all.

References Kew Royal Botanic Gardens
Modern binomial name Rafflesia arnoldii
Common name Corpse flower
First described Robert Brown 1820
Distribution Borneo & Sumatra.