MEMOIE OF HIS FATHER 379 



survey of Indian Botany, a task which meant working anew 

 over the exact distribution of the whole Flora and condensing 

 the result into the compass of fifty-five pages. For this 

 intricate piece of analysis and condensation he was at first 

 allotted a bare three months, but exacted six ; when at last 

 it was ready, he was told that publication must be held over : 

 a serious thing, he complained, at his age. But happily it 

 was not left for another hand to pass through the press. 

 Though the Gazetteer was not published till 1907, a dis- 

 heartening delay which made him regard his Essay ' with 

 its corrigenda as quite behind time and hardly worth printing,' 

 an advance issue of the ' Sketch of the Flora of British India' 

 appeared in 1904, and he was able in the interval to work in 

 various touches as they occurred to him. 



More personal in the gratification it gave him was the 

 record of his father's life and work which he published in the 

 Annals of Botany in 1 902, occupying more than 200 pages of 

 the journal. 



It was therefore on a very different scale from the sketch 

 of Bentham's life-work in the Annals of Botany (December 

 1898, vol. xii. No. xlviii.), where he could not add much to 

 what he contributed to Nature shortly after Bentham's death. 



The memoir of his father was his principal occupation 

 from March to September, though he had hoped to finish it 

 for the April number. He finds it ' as laborious as it is a 

 grateful work,' for biographical writing did not come easily 

 to him. ' I wish I had your facility for writing biography ! ' 

 he exclaims to Mrs. Lyell, mindful of her memoir of her father, 

 Leonard Horner ; and here he was met by the further difficulty 

 that his father had kept no diary or journal, and the threads 

 of many matters had to be laboriously unravelled from his 

 ' vast and voluminous correspondence at Kew, about 80 

 volumes,' some 27,000 letters. 



To Inglis Palgrave 



April 26, 1900, 



I have just done glancing over my father's letters to 

 Dawson Turner, 1805-1851. Except in as far as they throw 



