150 



years, where I often met him. I had known him ever since he 

 was at Cambridge, and even in his undergraduate days he began 

 to take up the study of Mycology with ardour and success. 



I have so slight an acquaintance myself with that branch of 

 botany, that I am glad to be able to give the testimony of others 

 as to what Broome did in this way, and the excellence of his 

 work. 



Broome has bequeathed his rich Collection of Fungi to the 

 British Museum, and I am permitted to make an extract from a 

 letter written by Mr. George Murray, an assistant curator in the 

 botanical department of the Museum, to one of our Members, in 

 which he speaks of Mr. Broome as follows : — " The great mass 

 of his work is contained in the long series of ' Notices of British 

 Fungi,' contributed by him and the Eev. M. J. Berkeley, to the 

 Annals and Magazine of Natural History. The whole of it, from the 

 earliest to the latest, is characterised by remarkable accuracy, the 

 result of faithful, conscientious research, often involving far more 

 labour than appears. A mere dry reference may contain the 

 result of serious scientific labour, and in such matters as that, 

 Mr. Broome took as great pains to be accurate beyond doubt as 

 in far more showy researches so to speak. His modesty appeared 

 in his work. No one but the Rev. Mr. Berkeley can know the 

 full extent of it, but all students of the subject recognise his 

 authority and trust it implicitly as of the highest order. . . 

 . . It is impossible to separate the two names, Berkeley and 

 Broome, they are familiar to all workers in botany, as the very 

 highest authority on British Mycology, and in the first rank 

 of workers in this field throughout the world." 



Thus far the letter. Besides working in the field and in his 

 study, Broome did hard work in yet another way. He was a 

 successful cultivator of plants, and did much in the garden with 

 his own hands. His garden was always attractive — to botanists 

 especially — from its containing many choice or rare plants not 

 often met with in other gardens. Perhaps the most attractive 



