174 
to dispose of his botanical collections where they would be use- 
ful, and offered to send the whole to Kew to be retained there or be 
presented to other establishments, as the Director should advise. 
The offer was accepted, and, by mutual aLrreriiient, the excellent 
British collection was presented to the Hastings Museum, Wor- 
cester, and the considerable Foreign collection, with the exception 
of a few specimens retained for Kew, was presented to the 
herbarium of (iiaMi-'W "Cniwi-itx . Mr. .M;u ii-w s died at Broad- 
water Down, Tunbridge Wells, on the 5th September, 1901, and 
since his deal is found sundry other collections 
of dried plants which she has transmitted to Kew. Among 
them were a few from Iceland which have been incorporated in 
the Kew Herbarium. The others, comprising between 600 and 
700 specimens, have been sent to Glasgow. Mr. Mathews was 
born at Hagley, near Birmingham, in 1S28, and was educated at 
King's College, London, and St. John's College, Cambridge. 
After taking the degree of M.A., he joined the Birmingham firm 
of land surveyors of which his father was the head. He began 
studying botany at Cambridge under Babington, and after his 
return to Birmingham pursued the subject with great ardour, 
soon becoming an authority on the flora of Warwickshire and 
Worcestershire. He was a contributor to the Phytoloyisl, the 
Journal of Botany, to Bagnall's Flora <>f Wa nrickshirc, and to 
Lees's Botany oj Wort %U ihire, and was the author of a Flora of 
the C!ent and Lirkey Hills. His trawls abroad were chiefly in the 
Alps and Algeria, where he made the foreign collections alluded 
to above. The results of his study of the flora of Algeria are 
given in a lirr Flora tf Algeria consider^} in 
Relation to tin- Physical /{/story >,/ lh>' Mrdihrranean Region 
und supposed Submergence of the Sahara, published in 1880. 
Mr. Mathews was also a geologist and a great climber of peaks. 
He was a personal friend of the late .John Ball, and one of the 
co-founders of the Alpine Club, a contributor to its literature, and 
one of its early Presidents. In recognition of his geographical 
discoveries in the Italian Alps, he was decorated by King Victor 
Emmanuel with the Order of St. Maurice and St. Lazare. 
Picea breweriana -Arboriculturists will be interested to know 
that there is in the Kew collection of Conifers a specimen of this 
remarkable Spruce. The species has been found wild only on the 
summits of the Siskiyou Mountains in Northern California, and 
m one locality on the coast range of Oregon. One of the rarest 
of all trees, its numbers, even in a wild state, are, so far as is at 
present known, limited to a few scores. The Kew plant was 
presented to Kew in its seedling state by Professor Sargent, of the 
Arnold Arboretum, Mass., a few years ago, and it is, we believe, 
the only one alive in Europe. It is now about four feet high and 
m perfect health. The species was first discovered in 1884, but 
seeds were not collected till 1892. Of the thousands of young 
astern States of North America from' these 
scarcei > m : >m-viv« i. md a ^ -rafted plants in the 
Arnold Arboretum are all that i 
