90 
At the end of 1891 he resigned the Directorship of the Gardens 
and became Government Botanist, retaining the post of Curator of 
the Herbarium. These appointments he held until his voluntary 
9 
been a member of the Council of the University almost from its 
inception and acted for a number of years as one of its examiners. 
He also joined the South African Philosophical Society (now the 
Royal Society of South Africa) at its formation in 1876 and was 
for many years one of its most active members. In 1885 he was 
elected its President, but as years went on and especially when 
bodily infirmities made themselves felt, he became more and more 
a recluse. When the South African Association for the Advance- 
ment of Science was formed in 1903 he wrote to me :—* All these 
tokens of the awakening of the scientific spirit have come too late 
to be of any use to me. am content to keep quietly on in the 
old groove and shall think it enough to have built up a good 
herbarium out of next to nothing.” 
He never visited England after he had come out here, and even 
in South Africa he did not travel much. There was never any 
time for it. 
For a couple of years after his retirement he worked daily for 
6 or 7 hours at the herbarium of the Albany Museum, chiefly 
putting the Gill College collection into excellent order again. In 
his private life he had many cruel trials and disappointments to 
which no reference can be made here, but -his spirits had remained 
almost boyish, as Dr. Juritz rightly put it, until about five years 
ago. ‘T'wo years ago he had a slight stroke of paralysis and finding 
the climate of Grahamstown rather too cold in winter he removed 
to Uitenhage. The end came gradually though not unexpectedly. 
e met it in the same philosophic spirit in which he had gone 
through life. He left a son and two married daughters with their 
families to mourn his loss. 
is work was chiefly pioneering work in a “new” country, but 
I venture to think that should the true history of South Africa 
ever be written an honourable place will be occupied in it by 
MacOwan’s work. 
S. ScHénLanD 
