250 THE JOURNAL OF BOTAJifT 



additional assistant : the vacancy now caused by Carruthers's 

 promotion was tilled bv me in 1871 (see Journ. Bot. 1917, p. 93). 



This was not my first introduction to Carruthers : I had made his 

 acquaintance in 186-1. In my rambles over Putney Heath and 

 Wimbledon Common, I had found a plants an outcast from a garden, 

 which had puzzled me, and at the suggestion of W. W. Nevvbould, 

 who had introduced himself to me on the strength of a list of Kevv 

 Bridge plants which I had published in the first volume of this 

 Journal (1853), I took it to the Botanical Department, where 

 Nevvbould was then a familiar figure. He made me known to J. J. 

 Bjnnett, whom I can see now, coming out of the Keeper's room with 

 his hands beneath his coat-tails, who took me to Carruthers who solved 

 my difficvilt}" — the plant was i2/y/;«« Iwvis. The circumstances under 

 which Newbould severed and subsecjuently renewed his relations with 

 Carruthers and the Dejmrtment are set forth in my account of New- 

 bould (Journ. Bot. 18S(>, 165). 



Shortly after this I went to High Wycombe, returning to London 

 in 1869 to take up an apjx)intment in the Kew Herbarium : I used 

 then to meet Carruthei-s at the Linnean Society's meetings, to which 

 J. G. Baker often took me, and later when visiting the Botanical 

 Department in connexion with the Crassulacead, which I was preparing 

 for the forthcoming volume of the Floi*a of Tropical Africa. Trimen 

 was well known to me both by correspondence while I was at High 

 Wycombe and through meetings at the Society of Amateur Botanists: 

 in joining the Mnseum staff I was therefore not coming among 

 strangers, and nothing could have been kinder than Carruthers's 

 welcome. With his assistants — or, or as he preferred to call them, 

 colleagues — ^liis relations were always most friendly : during my 

 twenty-four yeai-s' association with him, 1 can remember no occasion 

 on which any friction arose between us ; and this was perhaps the 

 more noteworthy as on certain matters unconnected with the Depart- 

 ment Ave differed very strongly. An assistant in another Department, 

 whose relations with his Keeper were less cordial, once referred to the 

 botanists as "a happy family," and the phrase not inaptly expressed 

 the prevailing atmosphei-e. The fact that the Department was 

 contained in one gallery and practically in one room doubtless con- 

 tributed to this, but with another chief the result might have been 

 very different. 



Coming from Kew, where the casual inquirer was officially 

 discouraged, I was struck by Carruthers's almost excessive readiness to 

 supply information or to answer questions of the most trivial nature. 

 I remember, for example, that we supplied specimens and drawings 

 to tiie artist who was designing the laurel wreath which Tracy 

 Turnerelli proposed to present to Lord Beaconsfield, and a fig-leaf 

 for a sculptor who required that garment for a statue on which he 

 was engaged ; still more do I remember a large lady, with a small 

 companion, who was a frequent visitor, to whom Carruthei's lent at 

 her request a volume — his own copj^ — of the Genera Plantarum, 

 which she returned in the course of two or three days with the i-emark 

 that she had found several mistakes in it. His assistants were, I fear, 



