Biographical Notice of the late Dr. J. HK. Gray. — 288 
in after life procured him many “ unfriends.” In 1826 the 
Zoological Club was developed into the Zoological Society, 
which Dr. Gray at once joined, and he was one of its most 
active Fellows until ill health confined him to his house. 
In the mean time, in 1824, he had become an assistant 
in the Natural-History Department of the British Museum, 
of which he was appointed Keeper in 1840, on the resignation 
of Mr. Children. With this great national establishment his 
life has since been inseparably connected. 
In 1826 he married the widow of his cousin, the only son 
of Dr. E. W. Gray, his granduncle, a former secretary of the 
Royal Society ; and this lady, who survives to mourn his loss, 
assisted him in all his subsequent labours, and is herself the 
author of the well-known ‘ Figures of Molluscous Animals.’ © 
For more than fifty years Dr. Gray’s life was one of un- 
ceasing activity. Considerably more than a thousand books, 
memoirs, and notes on almost all departments of zoology, 
attest the extraordinary versatility and energy of his mind ; 
and his earliest efforts, when little more than a boy, were 
devoted to the kindred science of botany, in which he, with 
the cooperation of his father, was the first to introduce the 
Jussieuan Natural System to English botanists. It may be a 
question whether his efforts for this purpose, in the ‘ Natural 
Arrangement of British Plants,’ were not the cause of that 
ignominious rejection by the Linnean Society of which we 
have already spoken. 
But even the exertions necessary to produce the vast mass 
of written zoological papers which bear his name did not ex- 
haust his activity ; and we find him showing a strong interest 
in such varied matters as sanitary and metropolitan improve- 
ments, education, prison discipline, and the abolition of im- 
prisonment for debt, the improvement of the treatment of 
lunatics, and the opening of museums, libraries, picture- 
galleries, and gardens to the public. Dr. Gray claimed to have 
been the original proposer of the system of a low uniform rate 
of postage to be prepaid by stamps—a system carried out by 
Rowland Hill, and now adopted all over the world. He took 
much interest in the question of the adoption of a decimal 
scale of coinage, weights, and measures in this country; and 
between 1854 and 1857 published numerous articles and 
pamphlets on this subject. His opinion was that if a decimal 
system were to be adopted, it should be organized on the 
principle of making the larger coms decimal multiples of a 
small existing unit, such as the penny, instead of decimal 
divisors of a large unit, such as the pound. 
In considering the immense mass of work published by Dr. 
Gray, the zoologist may sometimes be inclined to wish that 
