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in perfecting the arrangement of the library of Scientific works he 
had given to the Royal Literary and Scientific Institution, 
adding fresh books to the valuable store (some 2,000 in number 
already accumulated there) that his feeble strength of body was 
overtaxed, and finally giving way under the strain, his long and 
useful earthly career was terminated. To Leonard Blomefield 
may the Horatian line be truly applied, “ Integer vite scelerisque 
purus.” 
Leonard Jenyns was born (as he tells us in ‘‘ Chapters in My 
Life,” printed for private circulation in 1887 and from which I 
have obtained most of my information) on the 25th of May in 
the year 1890, at No. 85, Pall Mall, London; adding with his 
usual accuracy in all minor details, “ at 10 p.m.” 
The youngest but one of seven children—three brothers and 
four sisters—he attributes what moral and intellectual qualities 
he possessed chiefly to his mother’s side. Daughter of perhaps 
the most distinguished physician of the day, Dr. Heberden, a 
scholar well versed in classical and general literature; her 
mother, the sister of the Rev. Francis Wollaston, an astronomer, 
F.R.S., and father of Dr. William Wollaston, celebrated for his 
researches in Chemistry and Optics, and friend of Sir Humphrey 
Davy, we can understand how this scientific germ developed in 
Leonard Jenyns into that fondness for Science which he 
entertained through life. His father, the Rev. George Leonard 
Jenyns, son of an Alderman of Eye, in Suffolk, Canon of Ely (or 
Prebendary as then called) and Chairman of the “ Bedford Level” 
and of the London Board of Agriculture, seems to have been a 
parson of the old stamp, a great farmer, fond of sporting and 
more addicted to out-door sports than the management of a 
large parish. His succeeding, whilst young, to the Bottisham 
Hall property in Cambridgeshire on the death of his second 
cousin, the celebrated Soame Jenyns, may have been the chief 
reason for this devotion to country pursuits. Owing to this 
example before him too we may attribute the son’s resolve upon 
