Ilya Grigoryevich Borshchov was born in St Petersburg in 1833 in the family of a civil servant. He studied at St Peter;s school, then went to the Alexandrovsky [formerly Tsarskoselsky] Lyceum. In the Lyceum, Borshchov showed a great interest in botany. The Director of the Lyceum allowed him and his elder brother Grigory to have one extra day of vacation for botanical excursions near St Petersburg. After finishing at the Lyceum, he served as a finance clerk, then he worked as an assistant of the secretary at the Chancellery of the Minister of Finance and, from 1857, as an official for special commissions of the Minister of Finance.
Botany and chemistry attracted him most of all, however. Working at the Ministry he became acquainted with Academician F.I. Ruprecht. They often arranged trips to the outskirts of St Petersburg. At that time Ilya and his brother Grigory, who also served at the Ministry of Finance, were given a commission from the Russian Academy of Sciences to work through the mosses and fungi collected by O.F. Middendorf during his trip along northern Siberia in 1843-1844. This work served as a basis for a monograph Musci Taymyrenses, Boganidenses et Ochotenses, nec non Fungi Boganidenses et Ochotenses, in Expeditione Sibirica Annis 1843 et 1844 Collecti (1856). In this paper three new fungi species were described.
The materials collected during excursions near St Petersburg, and particularly the fungal species which were little-known or interesting from the morphological point of view, were summarized by Borshchov in another paper Fungi Ingrici novi aut Minus Cogniti, Iconibus Illustrati (1857). In 1856, Academician Ruprecht made a report about this work at a session of the Russian Academy of Sciences and recommended it for publication in volume 10 of the academic journal Beiträge zur Pflanzenkunde des Russischen Reiches. The Academician drew special attention to about 200 excellent pictures of fungi made by Borshchov. Only 8 of them were appeared as illustrations in the paper (after Borshchov's death, his wife, M.A. Borshchova, sold the album containing these watercolour pictures of fungi to Kiev University; the album then resided in the library of the M.G. Kholodny Institute of Botany, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine). It is known that around the same time, Borshchov wrote a work Mycologia Petropolitana with detailed descriptions of fungi and myxomycetes collected in 1855-1856 and with indications of their location. Unfortunately this work was not published, and the manuscript has most probably been lost. The album already mentioned also contains fungal illustrations which were intended to be used with that manuscript. Academician Ruprecht acted as a patron for Borshchov and, in 1857, recommended him to be joint leader (with N.A. Severtsov, the zoologist) of an expedition organized by the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences to carry out zoological and botanical surveys of steppe around the Aral Sea and Syrdarya River. On that expedition Borshchov studied mainly vascular plants, but the results of his work were so significant that, after returning home, the Minister of Finance allowed him to make a business trip abroad. Borshchov used this business trip to Germany, from 1859 to 1861, to attend lectures at Würzburg University. In 1861 he defended his candidate degree thesis.
After returning from Germany in 1862, Borshchov resigned from the Ministry of Finance and moved to Kiev. There he began to adapt his main work based on materials obtained during the Aral-Caspian expedition into a dissertation Results of Work on the Botanical Geography of the Aral-Caspian Krai. In autumn 1865, Borshchov defended his master's thesis at the Department of Physics & Mathematics of Kiev University. The dissertation was devoted mainly to vascular plants, but in the last part a few dozen cryptogamic organisms were described. Among these were 13 species of fungi, 3 described for the first time. In 1866, Borshchov was invited to take the post of senior lecturer at Kiev University, to read lectures on plant anatomy and physiology. As a result, his scientific interests changed somewhat. He continued to use fungi as research material, however, along with vascular plants. In 1868, he investigated the moving of plasmodium protoplasm in myxomycetes exposed to bright light. He observed continual movement of plasmodium protoplasm as an undulation and production of bubble-shaped swellings. These stimulated a rupture of the plasmodium external envelope and, as a result, partial discharge of protoplasm. Based on these observations, Borshchov came to the conclusion, that substantive movement occurs only in the internal mass of protoplasm.
In autumn 1867, at Kiev University, Borshchov defended his doctoral thesis on botany. The dissertation was devoted to an investigation of stem anatomy of a vascular plants of the family Asclepiadaceae. From 1869 onwards, Borshchov worked in Kiev University as an ordinary professor of botany. After the defence of his thesis, he showed a great interest in research on algae of Kiev oblast and of the adjacent oblasts of Chernihiv and Poltava. At the same time he continued to study fungal physiology and species diversity. In 1868, he published a paper on fungi physiology Zur Frage über die Ausscheidung des freien Ammoniaks bei den Pilzen. In this paper Borshchov demonstrated that fungi in a fresh state could secrete the significant amounts of ammonia during the day, and that temperature oscillations of 15-18C did not influence this process. In 1869, a large floristic work devoted to the fungi of Chernihiv oblast was published. It contained a list of 173 species and included some interesting details of their ecology and physiology.
Unfortunately, after that, Borshchov's mycological research ceased. Being a scientist with many interests, he later concentrated on different aspects of plant physiology. During the Russian-Turkish war of 1877-1878, Borshchov worked for some time as a medical assistant in a clinic for wounded, which was organized by professors of Kiev University. At the same time there was a typhus epidemic in Kiev, which started by spreading through the military hospitals. Borshchov was infected, and died at the end of April 1878 at the age of 44.
Lists. Publications. Taxa. Kirk & Ansell form of name: I.G. Borshch.
