260 KEW : 1879-1885 



You are right ; it is too soon for any sort of biographical 

 notice of life or works. 



As for myself, I have had a ten days' bout of my Anginic 

 pains, night and day, and am in a state of nervous worry, 

 with Bentham failing fast (82) and pressing the Genera 

 Plantarum on me, and no end of work in the Garden. 



In short I have my warning note struck. 



On the 26th Darwin was buried in Westminster Abbey. 

 Hooker was one of the pall-bearers. 



Bentham, the other friend of his youth and fellow-worker 

 of his age, lived long enough to see the publication of the 

 ' Genera Plantarum,' the monument of a quarter of a century's 

 work. At eighty-three, with work still to do, he was alert and 

 vigorous in mind, though growing frail in body, and sadly 

 lonely, having no near kith or kin to look after him. But the 

 interest of his great work once gone, he rapidly faded away, and 

 died on September 10, 1884. ' Bentham's loss was and is a 

 great loss to me,' he tells Berkeley, October 29 ; ' and I do not 

 get over it.' In the obituary notice of him in Nature (October 2) 

 (which a passing note tells us cost him two days' hard work), 

 Hooker declared that he had ' no superior since the days of 

 Linna3us and Robert Brown, and he has left no equal except 

 Asa Gray.' 



To Hooker he left the copyright of his British Flora and a 

 mass of papers and family things. Busy as he was, he hardly 

 knew how to deal with all this. He writes to Asa Gray 

 (February 15, 1885) : 



I am greatly troubled over Bentham's British Flora. 

 He has left me the copyright and duty of bringing out a 

 new Edition which Eeeve is calling out for. I must not 

 alter the character of the work, and yet how to do it justice 

 without introducing a good deal of new matter is the ques- 

 ' tion. It has been a very useful work, enticing many to 

 take up Botany who otherwise would not have done so. 



And on April 5 : 



I am puzzled what to do with all the family things he 

 left to me. I wish some Benthamophobist [?-philist] would 



