y4 PROCEEDINGS OF TTTK 



Orchidece, half an hour before the close of liis day's work. Most 

 men would have put down their pen with a sigh of relief and 

 attempted nothinp; fresh for the moment. Not so Bentham : 

 without a moment's hesitation be begged one of the assistants to 

 bring him the unnamed and doubtful specimens belonging to the 

 next part of his task, the Graminece on which lie at once commenced. 

 All will remember the pathetic words in which G-ibbon de- 

 scribes the completion of his great ' History.' "A sober melancholy 

 was spread OA-er my mind by the idea that I had taken an ever- 

 lastin*'- leave of an old and agreeable companion, and tliat what- 

 soever might bo the future date of my History, the life of the 

 historian must be short and precarious," In the latter years 

 of liis life Bentham was not less imbued with atlection for his 

 task, though the sense of the precariousness of life chiefly 

 affected liim with anxiety as to its completion. The flame of his 

 intellectual powers never burnt more brightly, too brightly 

 perhaps for a frame which slowly but ])erceptibly enfeebled. 

 During the last years of wliat was a supreme effort it was 

 impossible not to feel a degree of awe for the intense devotion 

 with which he pursued without intermission his self-imposed 

 labour. Towards the last it seemed to me that by mere effort of 

 will he actually sustained his bodily vitality. When the last 

 revise of the last sheet was returned to the printer, the stimulus 

 was v.ithdrawn ; his powers seemed suddenly to fail him. 

 Nature, long indulgent, would no longer be withstood. He 

 came once or twice again to Kew, but found no task that he 

 could settle to. At home he commenced a brief autobiography. 

 The pen with which he had written his two greatest works 

 broke in his hand in the middle of a page. He accepted the 

 omen, laid aside the unfinished manuscript, and patiently awaited 

 the not distant end. 



Bentham, like all really able men, had a perfectly just, but 

 a perfectly modest, appreciation of his own powers. He knew 

 tliat his gifts lay in tlie direction of systematic work ; and he 

 never attemited to travel beyond ground on which he felt per- 

 fectly sure. He would often ask men junior to himself to assist 

 him in the elucidation of some morjjhological point with the 

 handling of which he felt himself unfamiliar. It must not be 

 suj)posed that he reciprocated in the smallest degree the want of 

 sympathy towards morphology which the students of that branch 

 of biology are too apt to display towards taxonomy. But he 

 insisted that a sound taxonomy was the essential basis of all 

 biological work* 



He had seen " systematists, bred up in the doctrine of the 

 lixed immutability of species .... shaken and ])uzzled .... by 

 the promulgation of the Darwinian theories "f. Those theories 



* See Address to Linn. Soc. 1871, p. T). 

 t Ibid. p. 4. 



