374 BOTANICAL INFORMATION. 
lived in the neighbourhood, and who frequently had him at his house, 
where he loved to encourage the boy’s taste for the mechanical arts, in 
which he was himself no mean proficient. The rest of his school life 
was passed under Dr. Nicholas, of Ealing, and he was afterwards, for 
a short time, placed with a clergyman, the Rev. Mr. Phipps, in Warwick- 
shire. The pleasure that he now took in chemistry and his acquirements 
in that science were such, that when it was thought necessary he should 
enter some profession, he was urgent that this pursuit should be made 
available for the purpose, and he was therefore sent to Glasgow, and 
became, in 1821, an inmate, and we have reason to know a great fa- . 
vourite too, in the family of Dr. Thomson, the distinguished professor 
of chemistry in the University of that city. There he not only 
attended the medical curriculum in the college, but was an ardent 
pupil in Dr. Thomson’s publie and private classes. At the end of two 
years he took his degree in medicine. It does not appear that he 
showed any particular bias for the study of botany till his visit to 
Glasgow ; and then botanical excursions, more, perhaps, than the 
botanical lectures,—especially a short tour made in the Highlands of 
Scotland, where the zeal he evinced in pursuit of plants, and the in- 
quiring turn of his mind, are still vividly recollected by the writer of 
this brief notice,—induced him to make botany the chief object of the 
remainder of his life. His surviving sister well remembers the 
pleasure with which he described the botanical trip which first attached 
him to the study. 
He left Scotland finally in 1826, and, not feeling the necessity 
of engaging in medical practice, he commenced his travels in Ger- 
many, France, and Italy, returning to England in 1830. His pri- 
. vate letters to his family, now before us, show how profitably he 
. spent that time, and how much he must have enriched his mind in 
. all kinds of ‘subjects in any way connected with natural history. 
= Soon after his return he lost his excellent and affectionate mother, and 
from that period he lived in the society of his sister, first at Hastings, 
. then at Southampton; and finally, since 1836, at Eastmount, Ryde, 
. Isle of Wight. The two latter places are situated in Hampshire, 
"which beautiful eounty has been the principal and very successful 
field of his botanical researches, and gave rise to his * Notes and oc- 
casional Observations on some of the rarer British Plants growing 
et an eo godes volume 
