GEORGE BENTHAM. 457 
any conscious impression upon the reviewer’s mind, yet may 
have fructified afterwards. 
After his uncle’s death in 1832, Mr. Bentham gave his undi- 
vided attention to botany. He became a Fellow of the Lin- 
nean Society in 1828. Robert Brown soon after presented 
his name to the Royal Society, but withdrew it before the elec- 
tion, to mark the dissatisfaction on the part of scientific men 
with the management of the society when a royal duke was 
made president. Consequently he did not become F. R. S. 
until 1862. In 1829, when the Royal Horticultural Society 
was much embarrassed, he accepted the position of honorary 
secretary, with his friend Lindley as associate. Under their 
management it was soon extricated from its perilous condi- 
tion, attained its highest prosperity and renown, and did its 
best work for horticulture and botany. In 1833 he married 
the daughter of Sir Harford Brydges, for many years British 
ambassador in Persia, and the next year he took up his resi- 
dence in the house in Queen Square Place, Westminster, inher- 
ited from his uncle, in which Jeremy Bentham and his own 
paternal grandfather had dwelt for almost a century. The 
house no longer exists, but upon its site stands the western wing 
of the “Queen Anne Mansions.” The summer of 1836 was 
passed in Germany, at points of botanical interest and wher- 
ever the principal herbaria are preserved, the whole winter in 
Vienna. Some account of this tour, and interesting memo- 
randa of the botanists, gardens, and herbaria visited, com- 
municated in familiar letters to Sir William Hooker, were 
printed at the time (without the author’s name) in the second 
volume of the “Companion to the Botanical Magazine.” 
Similar visits for botanical investigation, mingled with recrea- 
tion, were made almost every summer to various parts of the 
continent; in one of them he revisited the scenes of his early 
boyhood in Russia, traveled with Mrs. Bentham to the fair at 
Nijni-Novgorod, and thence to Odessa, by the rude litter-like 
conveyances of the country. 
In 1842 he removed with his herbarium to Pontrilas House 
in Herefordshire, an Elizabethan mansion belonging to his 
brother-in-law, and combined there the life of a country squire 
