George Lawson was born on October 12, 1827, in Forgan, Fife, Scotland.

He was a Scottish-Canadian botanist, author, educator, and civil servant. After a private education, he was apprenticed to a solicitor in Dundee, but he continued his scientific self-education at the Watt Institution Library and helped found the Dundee Naturalists’ Association. In the 1850s, he studied natural and physical sciences in Edinburgh. He served as assistant secretary and curator to the Botanical Society of Edinburgh and assistant librarian of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In 1858, he was appointed the Professor of Chemistry and Natural History at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario. After the Botanical Society of Canada was founded in 1860, he helped create one of Canada's first botanical gardens. In 1862, he received an honorary degree of LL.D. from McGill University. In 1868, he became Professor of Chemistry and Mineralogy at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia. Lawson also lectured at Halifax Medical College, and in 1877, he helped organize the Technological Institute of Halifax. He served as secretary to the Central Board of Agriculture of Nova Scotia (1864-1885) and edited the Journal of Agriculture (1865-1885). He was a charter member of the Royal Society of Canada and its president from 1887 to 1888. He is considered the "Father of Canadian botany".

In 1850, he married Lucy Stapley (–1871) and in 1876, he remarried Carolin Mathilde Jordan. He died on November 10, 1895, in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Samuel Spahr Laws was born on March 23, 1824, in Wheeling, West Virginia.

He was an American theologian, professor, businessman, and inventor. In 1848, he graduated as a class valedictorian from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He also studied at Princeton Theological Seminary. In 1854, he became a professor at Westminster College, and in 1855, he was elected to the position of its president. At the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861, he was arrested and tried for treason after refusing to sign an oath of allegiance to the federal government. As a Virginia native, Laws was a southern sympathizer. He was jailed for 3 months in a St. Louis, Missouri prison and was released on the condition that he leave the U.S. He spent 1862 teaching in Paris, but in 1863, he returned to the U.S., settled in New York, and found a job as manager of New York City's Gold Exchange. As an amateur electrician, he invented the Laws Gold Indicator, a predecessor of the electric stock ticker tape machine. Laws served as president of the University of Missouri (1876-1889) and in 1889, he moved to Kansas City, Missouri, where he continued to write books and manage his investments. In 1893, he accepted a teaching position in Columbia, South Carolina at the Presbyterian Theological Seminary, where he taught until his retirement in 1898. Following retirement from his teaching career, he lived in Richmond, Virginia, Washington, D.C., and finally Asheville, North Carolina.

In 1860, he married Anna Maria Broadwell (1825–1917). He died on January 9, 1921, in Asheville, North Carolina.