LINNEAN SOCIETY OP LONDON". xlv 



' English Botany ' as Sowerby's, Sir James having been employed 

 by Sowerby to write the text for his plates. 



Whatever may have been the cause of his rejection, the fact 

 itself certainly had a great influence upon Dr. Gray's character. 

 It is easy to understand that the circumstance of being thus igno- 

 miniously and unfairly rejected must have been a bitter disap- 

 pointment to a young and enthusiastic naturalist ; and there re- 

 sulted an antagonism between him and those whom he thought 

 his enemies in the matter, and it has been said that he thus 

 became over-given to controversy. 



In 1826 the Zoological Club was developed into the Zoological 

 Society, which Dr. Gray at once joined, and he was one of its 

 most active Fellows until ill health confined him to his house. 



In the mean time, in 1824, he had become an assistant 

 in the Natural-History Department of the British Museum, of 

 which he was appointed Keeper in 1840, on the resignation of 

 Mr. Children. With this great national establishment his life 

 was afterwards inseparably connected. 



In 1826 he married the widow of his cousin, the only son of 

 Dr. E. W. Gray, his granduncle, a former Secretary of the Eoyal 

 Society ; and this lady, who survives to mourn his loss, assisted 

 him in all his subsequent labours, and is herself the author of tlie 

 well-known ' Eigures of Molluscous Animals.' 



For more than fifty years Dr. Gray's life was one of un- 

 ceasing activity. Considerably more than a thousand books, 

 memoirs, and notes on almost all departments of zoology, attest 

 the extraordinary versatility and energy of his mind. His ear- 

 liest efi"orts, when little more than a boy, were devoted to the 

 science of botany, in which he, with the cooperation of his 

 father, was the first to introduce the Jussieuan Natural Sys- 

 tem to English Botanists. It may be a question whether his 

 efforts for this purpose, in the ' Natural Arrangement of British 

 Plants,' were not the cause of that rejection by the Linnean 

 Society of which we have already spoken. 



But even the exertions necessary to produce the vast mass of 

 written zoological papers which bears his name did not exhaust 

 his activity ; and we find him showing a strong interest in 

 such varied matters as sanitary and metropolitan improvements, 

 education, prison discipline, the abolition of imprisonment for 

 debt, the improvement of the treatment of lunatics, and the open- 

 ing of Museums, libraries, picture-galleries, and gardens to the 



