ae ae aaa ee 
— A ee 
[ 
JAMES BACKHOUSE. 55 
religious work and travel, but his journeys never extended beyond 
Norway, where there is a considerable body of Friends, principally 
amongst the farmers and fishermen along the coast, whom he visited 
three times, and in whose welfare he took a warm interest. He lived 
at York, at first in the centre of the city ; but afterwards, when the 
business firm, of which, through the death of his brother, he became 
the senior partner, purchased more extensive grounds on the south- 
west side of the city, he removed to the village of Holgate, in the im- 
mediate vicinity of their nurseries, and occupied there for many years 
the house that formerly belonged to Lindley Murray, the grammarian. 
At Holgate he and his son laid out upwards of a hundred acres of 
ground in such a way that their garden is one of the regular recog- 
nized attractions of York. They were amongst the firststo build a 
large glazed fernhouse, in which the exotie species could be grown in 
the crevices of rock, and streams of water introduced. Latterly, they 
have paid special attention to the cultivation and importation of Hy- 
menophyllacee, and have introduced a great many new species, and 
planned a special house for this beautiful tribe, ingeniously constructed 
like a natural cavern, glazed over the top, with graduated temperatures 
to accommodate the inhabitants of different latitudes. But their spe- 
cial forte has always been rockwork gardening and the culture of 
alpine plants, and we believe that their collection in this department 
has long been the finest in the country. 
Mr. Backhouse was, in botany, entirely what we understand as a 
field, in contradistinction to a closet, botanist ; and so far as we can 
remember, he never published a technical description of a genus or a 
species in his life. His special delight was in alpine plants. There 
is ey: no one nn British botanists who has explored more 
thoroughly t traets of our own islands,—from Sutherland 
south ward to Derbyshire and Snowdon, from the Whitby and Scarbo- 
rough moors westward to Connemara,—than he and his son. For 
several years they interested themselves particularly in the genus 
Hieracium, which was very badly understood in England till they took 
it up,—collecting all the forms they encountered, and taking them 
home to cultivate; and Mr. James Backhouse, jun., duly published the 
result of their joint investigations in his ‘Monograph of the British 
Hieracia, which has been substantially adopted both by Babington 
and Syme. Upper Teesdale, which is easy of access from York, and 
