242 KEW : 1879-1885 



Indian Flora. But with a family to maintain, this was not yet 

 practical politics. He could only hope to economise time by 

 retiring from the active work of the learned societies which 

 he had served steadily for so many years. As he tells Asa 

 Gray (October 28, 1880) : 



The K. S. Councils begin to-day. Happily this is my 

 last year of them (for the present) after 10 continuous, and 

 16 in all ! just half my period of membership. I suppose 

 I must have been useful ! or else have been an egregious 

 impostor a little of both, we may conclude logically. As 

 it is, I feel a loathing to all that sort of work. 



How I wish that we could join you in Spain, but it is 

 impossible. We cannot leave home now, even if my duties 

 allowed of it, and I must get three months Bot. Magazine 

 off my hands before I go anywhere. 1 Bent ham too is 

 commenting on my slow progress at the Palms. 



1 It may be of interest, in alluding to Sir Joseph Hooker's editorship of the 

 Botanical Magazine, to give a brief account of its beginning and uninterrupted 

 existence of 129 years. Since 1787 it has appeared regularly every month 

 without fail, and probably no other serial or periodical can show such a record, 

 due in great part to the energy and resourcefulness of its editors, in bearing it 

 safely through more than one great crisis. For seventy-seven years of this 

 time it had two editors only, Sir William and Sir Joseph Hooker, and for seventy- 

 one years (from the time lithography was first employed in 1845, up to the 

 present volume) the plates were put on stone by two lithographers only, W. H. 

 Fitch and his nephew J. N. Fitch verily two further * records ' ! while, except 

 for a brief space, when W. H. Fitch retired in 1878, he and the present artist 

 have been the only artists employed on it for seventy-eight years, from 1837 

 to 1916 vols. 64 to 141 ! 



The founder of the Botanical Magazine was William Curtis, of the Society 

 of Friends, who was born in 1746, and, after some years as an apothecary, was 

 appointed Botanical Demonstrator to the Apothecaries Society at Chelsea. 

 He started the magazine, a serial of octavo size with coloured illustrations, in 

 1787 the first number containing only three plates. On his early death in 

 1799, Dr. John Sims became editor. He was born in 1749, and studied medicine 

 at Leyden and in Edinburgh, and finally settled as a physician in London. He 

 retired from tLe editorship in 1826, and was succeeded by Sir William Hooker, 

 who was artist to the magazine as well as editor for some ten years. His work 

 has a delicate finished style of its own, and he introduced the plan of giving full 

 analyses of his plants. ' In 1834, or even sooner, finding his other botanical 

 work too exacting, he began the training of a young man, Walter H. Fitch, who 

 in a very short time became one of our most famous botanical artists. In vol. 61 

 (1834) two plates are signed by him, and his work must have appeared, unsigned, 

 for some time before that, though only in 1837 (vol. 64) does he seem to have 

 become the regular, recognised artist to the magazine. No one has ever 

 excelled him in the life and vigour he put into his portraits of plants, the plant 

 itself lives before us, and his drawing was so accurate and yet so free, that Sir 

 Joseph once said delightedly, * I don't think Fitch could make a mistake in his 

 perspective and outline, not even if he tried ! * while in his sketch of his father's 



