LI. 
It is, happily, no new thing for public-spirited men in Australia, as elsewhere, 
of their wealth to provide for the needs, in the way of endowment, of educational or 
other institutions or enterprises whose aim it is to advance knowledge, to ameliorate 
human want or suffering, or by the discoveries of exploring parties to make known 
the resources of the most out of the way portions of the continent ; nor have such 
been exclusively confined to any one colony. But among Australian public bene- 
factors whose names are deservedly held in honour and esteem, William Macleay 
occupies a niche entirely his own. He was pre-eminently the Patron of Natural 
Science in Australia ; and as such he was a worker as well asa giver. And splendid 
though his benefactions were, amounting from first to last to about one hundred 
thousand pounds, he has left his adopted country a nobler and more estimable 
heritage in his example and in his long-continued personal service without fee or 
expectation of reward, and without any craving for outward and visible signs of 
public approval or popularity, actuated simply by a sincere desire to see the land of 
his adoption, whose splendid possibilities he fully recognised, attain the full measure 
of its intellectual as well as of its material development. 
J. J. Fuetcuer. 
