GEORGE BENTHAM. 453 
from one place of interest to another, bivouacking at night 
by the road, or in the garden of a friend, or in the precincts 
of the prefectures, to which latter he had credentials from 
the authorities in the capital. In this way he visited Orleans, 
Tours, Angouléme, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Montpellier, and 
finally Montauban, where a lengthened stay was made in a 
country house hired for the purpose. From Montauban (the 
cortége having broken down in some way) they proceeded still 
by private conveyances to Carcassonne, Narbonnes, Nimes, 
Tarascon, Marseilles, Toulon, Hyeres.” 
It was in the early part of this tour that young Bentham’s 
attention was first turned to botany. Happening to take up 
De Candolle’s edition of Lamarck’s “ Flore Francaise,” which 
his mother, who was fond of the subject, had just purchased, 
he was struck with the methodical analytical tables, and he 
_ proceeded immediately to apply them to the first plant he 
could lay hold of. ‘ His success led him to pursue the diver- 
sion of naming every plant he met with.” During his long 
stay at Montauban he entered as a student in the Protestant 
theological school of that town, pursuing “with ardor the 
courses of mathematics, Hebrew, and comparative philology, 
the latter a favorite study in after life,” and at home giving 
himself to music, in which he was remarkably gifted, to Span- 
ish, to botany, and, with great relish, to society. Soon after, 
the family was established upon a property of 2000 acres, 
purchased by his father in the vicinity of Montpellier. Here 
he resumed the intimacy of his boyhood with John Stuart 
Mill, who was five years his junior, and whose life-long taste 
for botany was probably fixed during this residence of seven 
or eight months in the Bentham family in the year 1820. 
About this time Bentham occupied himself with ornithology 
and then with entomology, finding time, however, for another 
line of study ; for at the age of twenty he had begun a trans- 
lation into French of his Uncle Jeremy’s “ Chrestomathia,” 
which was published in Paris some years afterwards; and he 
soon after translated also the essay on “ Nomenclature and 
Classification.” This was followed by his own “ Essai sur la 
Nomenclature et Classification,” published in Paris. This, 
