32 The South AustraHan Naturalist. 



pri]iei|)le.s of botanical classification. His first book was a 

 catalogne of the plants growing wild in tJie country about the 

 Pyrenees. It was written in French. 



At the age of twenty-six, George left his home in France to 

 live in London, where he acted as private secretary to his Uncle 

 Jeremy, and read for the English Bar. He was admitted in 

 1832, held one brief, and then reliqnished a legal career for 

 other pursuits, which were not so profitable to himself as they 

 were beneficial to science. The death of his father in 1832, 

 and of his uncle in the year following, left him in fairly com- 

 fortable circumstances. For some years previous to these 

 bereavements he had been writing on legal subjects, and in 1827 

 he began to publish a work on Logic. The publisher, however, 

 became bankrupt when only sixt}^ copies of the book had been 

 printed, and Bentham, with extraordinary diffidence, refrained 

 from carrying out further his undertaking. Yet the book con- 

 tained the enunciation of a principle known as the quantification 

 of the ju'edicate, the most imi)ortant discovery in Logic, accord- 

 ing to Professor Stanley Jevons, made since Aristotle had 

 written his treatise on that science 2,100 years before. A few 

 years later the well-known Scotch logician, Sir Wm. Hamilton, 

 announced the same discovery, and it was only in 1873, after a 

 heated controversy, that Herbert Spencer proved Bentham 's 

 priority. It was also shown, unhappily for the reputation of 

 Hamilton, that he had seen one of the few copies of Bentham 's 

 book that came into circulation, and had even reviewed it 

 briefly, without, however, alluding to its outstanding feature. 



Bentham now abandoned his studies in Logic and Jurispru- 

 dence, in both of which he had early showed distinction, and 

 devoted the remainder of his life — more than fifty .years — to the 

 pursuit of Botan}^ It must be recollected that in those days 

 the giants of that science were lajdng its foundations much as 

 we know it to-day. In England there were Robt. Brown, the 

 Hookers (father and son), and Lindle.y; in France, the de Can- 

 dolles (father and son) ; in Germany, Humboldt and others. 

 Bentham was to step up and become the peer of these eminent 

 men. He began by spending long vacations to study the her- 

 bariums in Paris, Berlin, Vienna, and other European cities, and 

 he soon realised that the main object of Botany consists not so 

 much in naming a plant as to determine its relations to other 

 plants; that is, is must be studied systematically not individu- 

 ally, intrinsically not extrinsically. 



From 1829 to 1840 Bentham was the honorary secretary of 

 the Horticultural Society (Eng.), and he managed its affairs so 

 successfully that Avhile on his taking charge it was financially 



