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IN MEMORY OF HENRY TRIMEN. 

 (With Portrait.) 



Henry Trimen was born on October 2Gth, 1843, at 3, Park Place 

 Villas, Paddington, London. He was educated at King's College, 

 London, firstly in the school and subsequently on the medical side 

 of the College. Very early in life he showed a strong liking for 

 natural history, and collected specimens of animals and plants with 

 much ardour. His elder brother Roland was devoted to the same 

 pursuits, and well remembers how, when it became a matter of 

 necessity to make a choice among the ''omnium gatherum" of 

 organic objects amassed, it was solemnly decided that Henry should 

 restrict himself to the study of plants, while his senior was to devote 

 his attention to insects. Holidays and half-holidays were almost 

 always occvipied by collecting excursions in the environs of London ; 

 and school vacations, with the annual visit of the family to the sea- 

 side, gave golden opportunities for field-work which were never 

 neglected. While he was still at King's College School he had 

 begun to form an herbarium, and frequently visited the Botanical 

 Department of the British Museum for the determination of his 

 collections. He was then a steady and careful worker, and a 

 careful observer of all the conditions of plant-life. 



He began his medical studies at King's College in the autumn 

 of 1860, The winter of 1864 he spent at Edinburgh University, 

 where, besides attending to his medical studies, he acted as clinical 

 assistant to Prof. Bennett. He joined the Edinburgh Botanical 

 Society, and secured the friendship of Prof. Balfour and many of 

 the younger botanists of Edinburgh. He graduated M.B. with 

 honours at Loudon University in 1865, and for a short time he 

 acted as district medical officer in the Strand district during an 

 epidemic of cholera. 



It was in 1864 that I made Dr. Triraen's personal acquaintance. 

 The Society of Amateur Botanists, which had been established in 

 1862 and of which some account will be found in this Journal for 

 1864, p. 287, was then in the best period of its not very long 

 existence, and Mr. Newbould took me to one of the meetings and 

 introduced me to Mr. Trimen and to Mr. Dyer — two names which 

 were then, like their possessors, intimately associated. To a lad 

 of eighteen, strange to public meetings and shy of strangers, these 

 young men of twenty-one seemed superior beings — an impression 

 intensified by a certain loftiness of tone which, in Trimen's case, 

 soon disappeared upon more intimate acquaintance. Trimen and 

 Dyer were the leading spirits of the Society, which, however, 

 also numbered men who have distinguished themselves in botanical 

 work during later life (of whom Mr. W. G. Smith is a conspicuous 

 example), as well as others whose attachment to botany was but 

 temporary. 



At this period, and for many years after, Trimen took a promi- 



JouRNAL OF Botany. — Vol. 34. [Dec. 1806.] 2 k 



