492 JN MEMOEY OF HENKY TBIMEN. 



he did in the lecture-room, I think that his life," he adds, " was, 

 until quite lately, a very happy one. He was able to give himself 

 unrestricted to the work he loved best, and in its practical appli- 

 cation to the tropical gardens of which he was in charge for sixteen 

 years was unquestionably most successful. He was free from family 

 cares or pecuniary anxieties, and up till two years ago enjoyed 

 unusually good health, while he had the happy gift of winniug the 

 affection and respect of all those with whom he had to do." 



On his arrival in Ceylon, Trimen threw himself with charac- 

 teristic energy into the various branches of his work. This involved 

 an entire rearrangement of the Gardens — a task the need and 

 execution of which are well set forth by M. Treub, of Buitenzorg, 

 a highly competent judge in such matters. The Garden, he says, 

 was " for many years under the direction of Dr. Thwaites, a man 

 of real merit, but who thought a botanic garden in a tropical 

 country should be in some manner a reduced copy of the virgin 

 forest. This system, more original than meritorious, excludes any 

 methodical arrangement of plants, and necessarily restricts the 

 number of specimens. Dr. Trimen, as soon as he arrived in 

 Ceylon, realized the disadvantages of the plan of his predecessor. 

 To distribute over an area of sixty hectares, without any order, a 

 great number of plants, for the most part not labelled, was fatally 

 to embarrass the scientific use of the rich collections that had been 

 brought together. So Dr. Trimen did not hesitate to adopt a new 

 arrangement of plants according to the natural system, and to label 

 them as far as it was possible for him to do so. With branch 

 establishments upon the plain and upon the mountain, the garden 

 of Peradeniya has before it a brilliant future."* 



His life in Ceylon was very pleasant, any feeling of isolation 

 being greatly modified by the visits of other botanists, such as Dr. 

 Marshall Ward and Mr. H. N. Kidley, or of other scientific men, 

 such as Prof. Ernst Haeckel, who, in his Visit to Cei/lon, speaks 

 warmly of Trimen's genial hospitality and "valuable instruction" 

 — " the seven days I spent in his delightful bungalow were indeed 

 to me seven days of creation." In such company Trimen would 

 take expeditions into parts of the island hitherto unexplored by him, 

 never failing to discover some interesting novelties. 



This is not the place in which to consider Trimen's services to 

 economic botany ; his annual reports show that he developed the 

 resources of the Garden in every direction, and his contributions to 

 quinology were important. But something must be said about his 

 botanical work in Ceylon. As soon as he had settled down, he 

 became conscious of the need of a flora of the island. In 1885 he 

 issued a catalogue of the plants, with the vernacular names and 

 references to Thvfa,\tes' s E^iiimeratio ; and in this Journal for the 

 same year he published a series of notes on Ceylon plants, in which 

 were included many novelties : a further list of additions will be 

 found in the volume for 1889. During a visit to England in 1886, 

 he went carefully through Hermann's Ceylon Herbarium, the basis 



* Annual Report of Smithsonian Institution, 1889-90, p. 390. 



