INTRODUCTION clxXV 



Britten's Contributions he supplied many notes on the plants about 

 Streatley and Pangbourn, and was the first recorder of Ranunculus 

 trichophyllus and Bartsia Odontites^ var. serotina ; he verified the occurrence 

 of Qalium tricorne, and recorded the discovery of Atriplex angustifolia in 

 Berkshire. Dr. Seemann named the beautiful Bignoniaceous genus 

 Newboulclia, and Babington a bramble Rubus Neivbouhlii after him. 



A most interesting and appreciative memoir of Mr. Newbould, by 

 Mr. Britten, will be found in the Journal of Botany, 1886, pp. 161-174, 

 accompanied by a photograph. The following cameo sketch of him 

 was written by one who knew him intimately and loved him well : 

 'No one who has been at all a frequent habitue of the Eeading-room 

 of the British Museum can easily help missing that slight, bent figure, 

 frail to attenuation with hardness of study and poverty of living ; the 

 bald head, with its scanty fringe of hair grizzled like the beard which 

 all but hid the nervous sensitive mouth, the wide benevolent forehead, 

 the ragged penthouse brows shading eyes sometimes almost uncanny 

 in their brightness, sometimes beaming with simple childlike pleasure 

 — the pleasure perhaps of knowing that he had in his pocket some 

 rai-e volume picked up at a second-hand bookstall for the friend to 

 whom he was talking— sometimes pathetic with an almost wistful 

 appeal for sympathy and indulgence with one who never failed to 

 give of both to all who came in contact with him ; the nervous hands 

 pointed at the tips for handling specimens, dusky with the dust of 

 rarely-opened books ; the thin aquiline nose, bowed shoulders, and 

 quick yet shuffling step ; the rusty tie, worn felt hat, and shabby ill- 

 cut clothes, powdered with dirt of museums, shiny with friction of 

 desks, piteous often in their lack of a woman's hand to keep them neat 

 or mended, their palpable insufficiency to meet the severities of wind 

 or weather to which he was so constantly exposed, yet never, through 

 all their dinginess and poverty, lacking that impalpable something, that 

 unconscious indestructible stamp of refinement, of gentle birth and 

 gentle culture, which was one of the most delicately marked charac- 

 teristics of the man, whose absolute humility, whose absence of every 

 vestige of pretension, was his most striking virtue. . . . We workers in 

 the world where he worked for others always, for himself never, 

 forget many things and forget them easily; but those who have grown 

 familiar with the picture thus recalled, who look for it in vain in the 

 place where we have so long known it, will scarcely do so without 

 a sigh, without a loving revei'ent remembrance of William Newbould.' 

 I well remember my first introduction to the subject of this notice, 

 and the pleasant walk I took with him to see Rumex palus'ris and 

 R. syhestris by the Thames in Surrey, and the great kindness he showed 

 me, and the great encouragement he gave me, then and on many sub- 

 sequent occasions. He appeared as delighted at the preparation of 



