GEORGE BENTHAM. 459 
and not much of facility; and he was able to finish in the 
spring of 1883 the great work upon which he was engaged. 
As was natural, his corporeal strength gave way when his work 
was done. After a year and a half of increasing debility he 
died simply of old age — the survivor of his wife for three or 
four years, the last of the Benthams, for he had no children, 
nor any collateral descendants of the name. 
A large part of his modest fortune was bequeathed to the 
Linnean Society, to the Royal Society, for its scientific relief 
fund, and in other trusts for the promotion of the science to 
which his long life was so perseveringly devoted. 
The record of no small and no unimportant part of a natu- 
ralist’s work is to be found in scattered papers, and those of 
George Bentham are quite too numerous for individual men- 
tion. The series begins with an article upon Labiate, pub- 
lished in * Linnea ” in 1831; it closes with one in the “ Jour- 
nal of the Linnzan Society,” read April 19, 1883, indicating 
the parts taken by the two authors in the elaboration of the 
“Genera Plantarum,” then completed. Counting from the 
date of the Catalogue of Pyrenean plants, 1826, there are 
fifty-seven years of authorship. His first substantial volume 
in botany was the “ Labiatarum Genera et Species, or a de- 
scription of the genera and species of plants of the order 
Labiate, with their general history, characters, affinities, and 
geographical distribution,” an octavo of almost 800 pages, of 
which the first part was published in 1832, the last in 1836. 
He found even the European part of this large order in much 
confusion; his monograph left its seventeen hundred and 
more of species so well arranged (under 107 genera and in 
tribes of his own creation) that there was little to alter, ex- 
_ cept as to the rank of certain groups, when he revised them 
for the “ Prodromus” in 1848, and finally revised the genera 
(now increased to 136, and with estimated species almost 
doubled) for the “ Genera Plantarum” in 1876. Although 
the work of a beginner, it took rank as the best extant mono- 
graph of its kind, namely, one of a large natural order, with- 
out plates. In it Mr. Bentham first set the example in any 
large way, of consulting all the available herbaria for the in- 
