378 FINAL BOTANICAL WOKK 



under the microscope. Even then they were not satisfactory. 

 But his friends in India came to the rescue, sending whole 

 herbarium sets from Madras, Calcutta, and Saharunpore. 

 They made drawings for him from the living plants, and Mr. 

 Duthie in particular made fresh collections for him in the 

 Western Himalayas, sending over new specimens most carefully 

 gathered and preserved by an admirable collector, Inayat 

 Khan, after whom Hooker gratefully named a new species. 



He began re-examining the Balsams in 1898. By October 

 1899 he set steadily to work after the Ceylon Flora was off 

 his hands. In one form or another this continued to be his 

 principal occupation to the end of his life. In the main it 

 took shape in an Epitome of the British Indian species of 

 Impatiens, which occupied fifty-eight pages in the ' Botanical 

 Survey of India, 1904-6,' vol. iv. (1906). 



Subsidiary to this was the identification and naming of 

 the specimens sent to him, and these were many, for gradually 

 all collections of Impatiens gravitated towards him, as the 

 one man who had anything like full knowledge of the Genus. 

 More than that, he published in 1904 a description of those 

 in the Wallichian collection at the Linnean Society, and in 

 1908 of those in the Herbarium of the Paris Museum. 



He was then ninety-one, but continued to work in this rich 

 and inexhaustible field. India completed, his botanical impetus 

 carried him on to the Balsams of all South-Eastern and Eastern 

 Asia. Thus in each of the three succeeding years he published 

 twenty-five drawings of curious Asiatic species in the Icones 

 Plantarum ; each year in the Kew Bulletin or the Botanical 

 Magazine he dealt with new species from Malaya or China or 

 the western Indian Peninsula, or reviewed the distribution 

 of the Order in particular localities such as the Philippines or 

 Chitral, while in the last year of his life also appeared his con- 

 tribution of the Balsamineae to Lecomte's ' Flore generale 

 de rindo-Chine.' 



These long and minute researches, however, did not use 

 up all his octogenarian energies. In the summer of 1901 , being 

 now eighty -four, he was requested by the Indian Government 

 to draw up for the Imperial Gazetteer of India a succinct 



