A SECOND TOUR TO GREECE. 195 



merits procured him the rank of Regius Professor 

 at Oxford ; he became a Fellow of the Royal So- 

 ciety in 1789, and was among the first members 

 of the Linnaean Society, founded in 1788. Yet, 

 though placed, a few years after his return, in very 

 affluent circumstances, and though his necessary 

 attention to his landed property and to agricul- 

 tural pursuits, of which he was passionately fond, 

 might have been expected in some measure to turn 

 him aside from his botanical labours, he steadily 

 persisted in the pursuit of his chosen object, to 

 which he finally sacrificed life itself. " No name," 

 says his biographer, Sir James Edward Smith, " has 

 a fairer claim to botanical immortality among the 

 martyrs of the science than that of Sibthorp." 



In the month of March 1794 he again set ouf 

 from London, on his second tour to Greece. He 

 travelled to Constantinople in the train of Mr 

 Liston, ambassador to the Porte, and was accom- 

 panied by Francis Borone, a Milanese servant, as a 

 botanical assistant. They reached the Turkish 

 capital in the month of May, where they were 

 joined by Mr Hawkins, a friend of Dr Sibthorp's. 

 Writing to Sir J. E. Smith from Pera, under date 

 August 9, the Doctor says : " I arrived very ill 

 with fever and colic ; but, as soon as my health 

 permitted, I visited the shores of the Bosphorus, 

 the woods of Belgrade, and the sands of Domusderi, 



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