534 GEORGE BENTHAM. 



management of the Horticultural Society ; and in his annual presi- 

 dential addresses, which form a volume of permanent value, his discus- 

 sions of general as well as of particular scientific questions and interests 

 bring out prominently the breadth and fulness of his knowledge and the 

 soundness of his judgment. 



The years which followed his retirement from the chair of the 

 Linnean Society, at the age of seventy-three, were no less laborious 

 or less productive than those preceding ; at the age of eighty (as the 

 writer can testify) the diminution of bodily strength had wrought no 

 obvious abatement of mental power, and not much of facility ; and he 

 was able to finish in the spring of 1883 the great work upon which 

 he was engaged. As was natural, his corporeal strength gave way 

 when his work was done. After a year and a half of increasing 

 debility, he died simply of old age, — the survivor of his wife for three 

 or four years, — the last of the Benthams, for he had no children, nor 

 any collateral descendants of the name. 



A large part of his modest fortune was bequeathed to the Linnean 

 Society, to the Royal Society for its scientific relief fund, and in other 

 trusts for the promotion of the science to which his long life was so 

 perseveringly devoted. 



The record of no small and no unimportant part of a naturalist's 

 work is to be found in scattered papers, and those of George Bentham 

 are quite too numerous for individual mention. The series begins with 

 an article upon Labiates, published in the Linna^a in 1831 ; it closes 

 with one in the .Journal of the Linnean Society, read April 19, 1883, 

 in<licating the parts taken by the two authors in the elaboration of the 

 Genera Plantarum, then completed. Counting from the date of the 

 Catalogue of Pyrenean Plants, 182G, there are fifty-seven years of 

 authorship. Ilis first substantial volume in botany was the " Labiatarum 

 Genera et Species," or a description of the genera and species of plants 

 of the order Labiatce, with their general history, characters, affinities, 

 and geographical distribution, an octavo of almost 800 pages, of which 

 the first part was published in 1832, the last in 1836. He found even 

 the European part of this large order in much confusion ; his mono- 

 graph left its seventeen hundred and more of species so well arranged 

 (under 107 genera and in tribes of his own creation), that there was 

 little to alter, except as to the rank of certain groups, when he revised 

 them for the Prodromus in 1848, and finally revised the genera (now 

 increased to 136, and with estimated species almost doubled) for the 

 Genera Plantarum in 1876. Although the work of a bcirinner, it 

 took rank as the best extant monograph of its kind, — one of a 



