DUBLIN UNIVERSITY HERBARIUM 211 



degree, or the licence of the College of Physicians. To render 

 him eligible, the degree of M.D. was at once conferred on 

 Harvey honoris causa, but after a good deal of discussion this 

 solution of the question was held to be inadmissible, and 

 George James Allman was appointed to the vacant chair. 

 Harvey, however, obtained the smaller appointment of Keeper 

 of the University Herbarium, which had fallen vacant at 

 about the same time owing to the death of Dr Thomas 

 Coulter, the botanical explorer of Central Mexico and Cali- 

 fornia. 



Harvey now at last found himself in a congenial post, with 

 a fair amount of leisure, and facilities for scientific work. He 

 presented his herbarium of over 10,000 species to the University, 

 which already possessed Coulter's extensive American collec- 

 tions. " I am as busy as a bee these times," he writes. " I rise 

 at 5 a.m. or before it, and work till breakfast-time (half-past 

 eight) at the ' Antarctic Algae^' Directly after breakfast I start 

 for the College, and do not leave it till five o'clock in the evening. 

 Again at plants till dusk. I am writing on the 'Antarctic Algae,' 

 and arranging the Herbarium, and have been working at Coulter's 

 Mexican and Californian plants." College vacations were now 

 usually spent at Kew, staying with his best friend Sir William 

 Hooker, and working hard in the Herbarium. On the way home 

 from the first of these vacations, he went to Torquay, to spend 

 some time with his old correspondent, Mrs Griffiths. They went 

 out boating, he and the good lady of seventy-six years ; and 

 together they visited the only British habitat of Gigartina 

 Teedii, six miles away, and gathered that coveted sea-weed in 

 the spot where Mrs Griffiths had discovered it in 181 1, the year 

 in which Harvey was born. 



Another very rare alga which he received about this time, to 

 his great delight, was Thuretia quercifolia from Australia, one 

 of the most remarkable of sea-weeds, bearing oakleaf-shaped 

 red fronds, formed of a beautiful lace-like double network with 

 regular hexagonal openings, which he was himself destined to 

 collect in quantity some years later at Port Phillip, and to figure 

 in his Phycologia Australica-. 



1 The algae of Beechey's Voyage. 2 Vol. i., plate XL. 



14 2 



