CHAPTEK XL 



KEW : 1879-1885 



THE years that followed the end of the Presidential term were 

 still full of incessant activity ; but it was the activity that 

 centred in Kew and the systematic botany to be completed at 

 home. Work on the Councils of the Eoyal Society and Linnean 

 Society continued into the early eighties ; but the best of his 

 active life being past he refused to think of new presidential 

 duties, whether at the Linnean or Geographical Societies, even 

 for the sake of carrying through desirable reforms. The days 

 of camp and field work were over ; the old explorer could 

 only respond to the call of the wild through others. For these 

 his sympathy, his experience, his advice, were unfailingly 

 ready more especially for Antarctic explorers, such as Dr. 

 Bruce of the Scotia, and Captain Scott, who twice revisited 

 the southernmost land of which he himself had been one of 

 the original discoverers. Past also were the days when he 

 had travelled with Darwin as a pioneer in speculative regions 

 more difficult and more perplexing than the unmapped in- 

 tricacies of the Himalayan passes. The joyous pains of the 

 long wrestle with Nature, the rapture of finding a way 

 through the maze, the first great conflict with a hostile 

 organisation, all these also were now of the past, and the 

 paths so laboriously broken had become the common highway. 

 Thus the picturesque element grows less though the solid 

 work moves on in the business of Kew, its constantly improved 

 organisation, the completion of the Genera Plantarum, and 

 the yet greater burden of the Indian Flora and the undertaking 

 of 'Darwin's last great gift to science, the Index Kewensis. 



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