Ixxxviii CHARLES CARDALE BABINGTON. 



1839. In company with Professor J. H. Balfour, he visited the 

 Outer Hebrides, in 1841, and reported on their scanty vegetation. 

 His work was almost entirely confined to British botany, but he 

 published in the eighteenth volume of the Transactions of the Linnean 

 Society, a monograph of the Indian Polygonums, and in the 11th 

 volume of the Journal of the Linnean Society, a paper on the " Flora 

 of Iceland," giving a complete list of the Phanerogamia of the island, 

 which he had visited during the year 1846. The first edition of his 

 magnum opus, the Manual of British Botany, appeared in 1843. This 

 work ran through eight editions during his life-time and was for 

 fifty years almost universally used as a hand-book and standard 

 of nomenclature by local botanists who made a study of critical 

 British plants. The special feature of the work was a careful 

 study of the difficult genera by means of the books and fasciculi of 

 dried specimens published by the critical botanists of neighbouring 

 continental countries. In the early editions he relied mainly upon 

 Koch, Fries, and Reichenbach, and in the later to these were added 

 the writings of Grenier, Godron, Boreau, Jordan, and Lange, and 

 the Exsiccata of Reichenbach, F. Schultz, and Billot. This book 

 brought him into frequent communication with nearly all the active 

 collectors in different parts of Britain, and entailed upon him a mass 

 of correspondence as referee, which occupied a large proportion of 

 his time. The writer of the present notice remembers with feelings 

 of gratitude the kind and patient way in which the Professor helped 

 him in his difficulties when, between forty and fifty years ago, he 

 was beginning the study of British botany, and was living in a small 

 country town where there were no herbaria or books of reference. 

 Professor Babington generally spent his long holidays in exploring 

 some rich botanical district at home, such as the Snowdon country, 

 Braemai', and Teesdale, and in this way made acquaintance in a 

 living state with most of the plants with which he had to deal. 

 Amongst the genera and sub-genera that he revised may be mentioned 

 Atrijylex, Arctium, Fumaria, Batrachium, Cerasti^mi, Dryas, Armeria, 

 Saxifraga, Hieracium, Fotamogeton, and especially Eubus. He con- 

 tributed about 150 papers, mainly on critical British plants, to 

 different periodicals and societies. 



In 1 846 he published the first edition of his Synopsis of British 

 Eubi, and a much-enlarged second edition in 1869. This was in- 

 tended to have been illustrated by a series of plates drawn by Mr. 

 J. W. Salter, but the preparation of these was stopped by Salter's 

 death, and they were not published. 



In the Ray Society, which was founded in 1844, as an enlarge- 

 ment of a Ray Club, which was started in 1836, he took an active 

 interest, serving on its council and helping in the editing of some of 

 its publications, especially the volumes devoted to the memoirs and 

 correspondence of the great naturalist from whom the Society took 

 its name. 



He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1851, the same 



