90 THK JOUHXAL Of HOT A NY 



to science is a note in the PhijfoJogisf (ii. 98(5: 1S47) on the plants 

 of Bouldersdale and Teesdale ; this is signed '' Daniel Oliver tertius," 

 the writer being the third bearer of the name : hence it will be seen 

 that, in common with most botanists who in later life have achieved 

 distinction, Oliver's (irst work was among British plants. Notes of a 

 visit to Ireland in l.S.jU and of a second in 1852 appear in the same 

 jom-nal (iv. 125, 176). It was dm-ing the first of these visits that he 

 added Xaias Jiexilis to our flora : other commmiications, relating to 

 Northamberland plants, are in the Transaciions of the Tyneside 

 NaUit'alists'' Field CIvb, of which Oliver was an active member. In 

 1853 he became a Fellow of the Linnean Society, of which body he 

 was at the time of his death the oldest Fellow. At the anniversary 

 meeting in 1898 the gold medal of the Society was presented to him 

 by the then President, Prof. Charles Stewart, who ]mid a high tribute 

 to Oliver's work, which had to a great extent l)een published in the 

 Society's Journal and Transactiofts, and of which he gave an inter- 

 esting summary (see Proc. Linn. Soc. 1892-3, 19). In a charac- 

 teristically modest reply Oliver deprecated the honour conferred on 

 him on the ground that he was " almost absolutely destitute of the 

 great hankering after research which characterized modern science," 

 adding that when, in 1884, the medal of the Koyal Society (of which 

 he was elected a Fellow in 1863) was conferred on him, " instead of 

 exchanging it for some apparatus for research, some rare book, or 

 some powerful lens, [he] exchanged it for a little water-colour 

 drawing."' 



In 1858, at the invitation of Sir William Hooker, Oliver came to 

 Kew and took up work in the Herbarium. His first systematic papers 

 were on Utrlculariacece (Journ. Linn. Soc. iv. : 1860). These were 

 followed by others, too numerous to mention individually, all marked 

 by the painstaking accuracy which characterized Oliver's work, no 

 matter in what direction : probably no one's genera and species have 

 been more generally retained in the light of subsequent knowledge 

 and research. But the papers which stand under his. name represent 

 only a small ))ortion of Oliver's undertakings : both Bentham and 

 Sir Joseph Hooker have acknowledged tlieir indebtedness to his help : 

 the latter found his work both in the Botanical Magazine and the 

 Icones materially aided by Oliver, who was accustomed to bring 

 together for him tlie specimens with the principal figures and descrip- 

 tions bearing upon them of each species, so that the material was 

 ready to Sir Joseph's hand as soon as he was prepared to use it. It 

 is no disparagement to Sir Joseph's great capacity and wonderful 

 power of work to say that his labours were greath^ facilitated by 

 Oliver's ready and willing co-operation. 



In 1864, Allan Black, the Curator of the Herbarium, retired on 

 account of ill health, and Oliver (who later commemorated him in the 

 genus Allanhlackia) was appointed Keeper of the Herbarium and 

 Library — a post wdiich he held until his retirement in 1890. The 

 manner in which Oliver discharged the duties of his office is so well 

 summed up by Dr. Hemsley in the Journal of the Kew Guild for 

 1898 that I cannot do better than i-eproduce it : 



" During this period he worked with untiring zeal on the constant 



