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JOUBNAIi OF HOBTICULTUKE AND COTTAGE GAKDENER. 



f Angast 1, 18SJ. 



JouENAL OF HoETicuLTUKE find thcmselves in the vicinity of 

 Blandford, I am sure that they will not regret going out of the 

 way to visit Bryanstone. — D., Deal. 



IN MEMOrJAM. 



May 15, 186G, Died W. H. Hakvey, M.D., F.R.S., &c. 



Of botanists, for the most part, the world knows but little, 

 till a dry name is all that is left ; and when we see that quoted 

 and referred to often enough in books, and long enough — that 

 13, for a few generations, some little interest about the individual 

 man begins to be felt ; his autograph becomes valuable, his 

 photograph would be beyond price. Imaginative people wish 

 they could know how he had passed his childhood ; how he wag 

 led to his favourite pursuits ; what help he had from others. 



For once, then, let us anticipate these slow decisions of 

 posterity, and while there are yet living hearts to be stirred and 

 eyes to overflow with pleasure at his fame, let us do homage to 

 one whose name is certain, in the generations to come, to be 

 qaoted and referred to, not only with respect as a general 

 naturalist, but as the highest authority in that lovely branch of 

 botanical study to which he for a long period of his life more 

 particularly devoted himself — Seaweeds. 



Dr. Harvey's native place was Summerville, near Limerick, 

 in Ireland. His parents were Quakers, and of eleven children 

 be was the youngest-born by five years ; which diflereucein age 

 rather deprived him of the natural play-companionship of his 

 brothers and sisters ; and he describes himself as having been 

 " the pet of the house." " I scarcely," says he in one of his 

 letters, " knew what it was to be crossed from infancy upwards " 

 — a training which would in many cases have been fatal in 

 encouraging conceit if not selfishness, but which left his 

 - constitutionally shy and sensitive nature scarcely self-confident 

 enough. 



Yet from a child he possessed an ample share of that resolute 

 purpose without which nothing great was ever accomplished. 

 Hence a passage in one of his letters, " I remember my dear 

 mother's words to me when I was a proud and wilful boy, 'I 

 had rather be a doorkeeper in the house of the Lord,' " &c. 



At thirteen he was sent to the school at Ballitore, where Burke 

 had begun his scholarly career, and to which he, and all who 

 were educated there, seem to have looked back with affectionate 

 regard. 



Here, then, and over the downs and cliffs of the wild county 

 of Clare, on the coast of which the Harvey family spent a 

 ^ portion of most summers, roamed the blue-eyed, fair-haired 

 schoolboy, who was to ramble half round the world before he 

 left it. And like other children he collected shells, and caught 

 insects, and picked up Seaweed, and gathered flowers and loved 

 them ; but, unlike most, when others forgot them or threw them 

 away, or only half observed them, he bore them in his thoughts, 

 compared one with another, kept them and reconsidered them, 

 asked questions and looked at books, and so by insensible degrees 

 acquired both information and a habit of observation which 

 few suspected. He did nothing probably, at that time, which 

 hundreds of others could not have done with equal ease had they 

 cared. But the feeling which made him wish to do it and crave 

 for further light was, like all other special tendencies of the 

 mind, a special gift. " Wert thou to examine a single Moss — 

 the most common — thou wouldst be in raptures — at least I was," 

 he writes to a friend, when only sixteen, " the exquisite beauty 

 and regularity of the fringe which surround the mouth of the 

 capsule, &c., &c." At last, during one of these wanderings over 

 hill and dale, he spied a tiny plant in the grass, which he did 

 not remember to have sceu before. If my memory of the 

 anecdote be correct, there was some accidental peculiarity about 

 the specimen which misled him, and, after the manner of young 

 naturalists, he hoped he had found something new, and ventured 

 the daring measure of sending it to a well-known botanist. Dr. 

 Wilson, who seems to have recognised in his correspondent, 

 even through a mistake, an amount of accuracy of eyesight 

 which augured great things to come. This was no new species, 

 he wrote, but he hoped the young sender would find many a new 

 one before Jie died ! The plant was the Little Field Madder 

 (Sherardia arveneis), and young Harvey had taken it for a new 

 species of Bedstraw (Galium). A few years later he was 

 more successful. He baduow left school and was in his father's 

 house of business at Limerick ; but even the desk left his love 

 of nature fervent as ever, and all his holidays were given up to 

 collecting and studying not one branch, but many, of life- 

 deyelopment ; and Dr. Wilson's prophetic hopes soon began to 



be realised. First came the discovery of a new fresh-water shell 

 (Limnsea involuta) in a mountain lake (Cromaglaun), near KU- 

 larney ; and then another " find," which determined the whole 

 course of his life — that of the rare Moss Hookeria lirtevirens 

 in two quite new habitats. The discovery of a new habitat or 

 place of growth is always a delight and triumph to a collector, 

 and on this occasion young Harvey once more ventured to 

 address a stranger. But the Moss he had found was Sir William 

 Hooker's. Its generic name was given in his honour, and to 

 him accordingly the letter was sent. And from this small oocnr- 

 rence grew not only a correspondence, but an affectionate 

 friendship which continued unbroken in its intimacy till the 

 death of Sir William Hooker in 1B65, less than a year before 

 that of his much younger friend. 



The acquaintance with Sir William Hooker decided young 

 Harvey's fate. He was now bent on quitting business and 

 devoting himself altogether to science, and Mr. Spring Bice (the 

 late Lord Monteagle), having appointed his elder brother Joseph 

 to the Colonial Treasurership at the Cape of Good Hope, our 

 William went out and worked under him until his death on his 

 return home in hopeless ill-health the following year ; after 

 which our Harvey succeeded to the post and fulfilled its duties, 

 with but one interruption (from illness), until ISll. But by 

 that time hot suns upon over-studious habits had accomplished 

 their evil work of prostration, and he was forced to resign the 

 situation and return home. 



Those were interesting years, however, which he spent at the 

 Cape. The post suited him exactly in many ways. For the 

 business part his experience under his father had fully qualified 

 him, and he found or made leisure for his favourite pursuits. 

 The opportunity, too, of seeing a new country and unknown 

 flowers stimulated his ardour into full activity — even too much 

 so for bis bodily health, though not for the mental enjoyment. 

 But the Cape life had its enchantments, and he often spoke of 

 it — of the tame ostrich he kept as a pet, and of the wonderful 

 beauty of the wild flowers ; their profusion, and the gorgeousness 

 of their colours. " Those are as common there as Daisies," said 

 he one day, standing before a bed of blazing Gazania pavonia. 

 And then he told, further, of having recognised it at the Cape 

 as a flower he had seen in his boyhood in Ireland, a solitai-y 

 plant having once been imported to Ballitore! "If any one 

 wants to love Botany let them go to the Cape," was his 

 conclusion upon his own experience ; but not even wild Gazanias 

 can drive the taste into an ungenial head-soil. 



Enough of this, however. The flora of the Cape and all other 

 land floras had, even at that time, a formidable rival in the 

 young naturalist's heart — the flora of the sea. He himself 

 describes the west coast of Ireland — Miltown Malbay, itc. — as 

 "the shore where, as a boy, I made acquaintance with the sea 

 and its treasures, and became enamoured of them." And 

 accordingly, though his first published volume was on the 

 " Genera of South African Plants,''* his second was a " Manual 

 of British Alg:r," which (re-edited in 1849), remains one of his 

 most charming aud useful books. When he wrote this he was 

 settled in his own county, having been appointed first Keeper 

 of the Herbarium at Trinity College, Dublin, and afterwards 

 Professor of Botany — both which offices he held for the rest of 

 his life. 



We must never think of him, however, as a stationary closet 

 naturalist. The flora of the sea was not to be understood without 

 constant excursions to the coast in different directions ; but 

 such necessities were a pleasure ; and in .January, 1816, 

 he brought out the first part of one of his larger works — the 

 " Phycologia Britannica, or History of British Seaweeds ;" all 

 the species of which, to the number of 360, he figured and drew 

 on stone himself. Next year came out the " Nereis Australia, 

 or Alga; of the Southern Ocean," with fifty plates only, but 

 showing that even while at the Cape his mind had not been 

 diverted altogether from this most favourite subject. 



Then followed the " Seaside Book," which treated of " the sea 

 and its treasures " generally, and is acknowledged to be " a 

 model " of its kind. And in 1819, having received an invitation 

 from two public institutions in America, he visited the United 

 States, gave lectures, classified botanical collections, _and 

 explored the coasts from Canada down to Florida and the Keys. 

 And thence, after a nine, months absence, he returned to 

 Dublin laden with new specimens and information ; the fruits 

 of which were the noble three volumes of his " Nereis Boreali- 



• Singularly onouRh to return to this snliject in the last years of his 

 life. He worked at the elaborate "Cape Flora," which he was bringing 

 out in conjunction witll Dr. Souder, of Hamburg, as long as work was 

 possible. 



