162 Obituary Notices. 



within a year into the previously closed precincts of the 

 Chinese Empire to do his well-known work of botanical 

 collecting. We therefore drop a stone on his cairn. A 

 glance at the map of Asia will show the vast area visited, 

 comprising South and North China, Java, Manilla, Formosa, 

 and Japan. Fortune's travels from 1843 to 1861, and the 

 picturesque and fantastic details of those lands almost then 

 unknown, except by the questionable details of a few Dutch 

 travellers, given in his various books, have been appreciated 

 by thousands of general readers. Fortune was middle sized, 

 somewhat spare in form, and his features indicated great 

 determination, though suavity and modesty predominated. 

 His physiognomy reminded one that peace hath its 

 heroes as well as war, for he was not unlike the Duke 

 of Wellington. Mr Gorrie has furnished me with a 

 characteristic anecdote. Meeting him on a Monday in 

 August 1860, after his return on the Thursday previous 

 from his American Government employ, because of the 

 outbreak of the civil war, his old friend said — " Well, 

 Fortune, surely home for good now ! " " No," said the 

 traveller, " I have just learned the Japanese ports are open 

 to Europeans, and I go there on Thursday." If that visit 

 rejoiced the hearts of European horticulturists, as well as 

 proved most remunerative to the traveller, we can well 

 understand why the foreman of Van Siebold's nursery 

 should have held up his hands in horror on hearing that 

 Fortune and Veitch were away to spoil his hitherto ex- 

 clusive Japanese preserves. In a list published by himself 

 in the " Gardeners' Chronicle," January 3, 1880, p. 11, 

 Fortune enumerates nineteen trees, forty-nine shrubs, and 

 nineteen herbaceous plants introduced to Britain by him 

 from China, as well as sixteen trees, twenty-one shrubs, 

 and twelve bulbs and roots from Japan. These include 

 some new races of camellias, some azaleas, Moutan peonies, 

 and Japanese chrysanthemums. Indian tea-planting claims 

 Fortune as an early and most successful promoter ; and he 

 first made clear how black and green teas really come 

 from the same plant. 



Mr Fortune had very much retired from public life since 

 1866. He died at Brompton, on 13th April 1881, aged sixty- 

 eight, leaving a wife, with two sons and two daughters. 



