20 THE MUSIC OF WILD FLOWERS 



flora appealed to him ! " Flowers," he wrote home, 

 " most lovely and wonderful. We are making a 

 splendid collection. Rose and the local botanist got 

 more than fifty new sorts one morning." Not many 

 months after his return Kingsley lay dying of pneu- 

 monia in Eversley Rectory. He was kept constantly, 

 we are told, under the influence of opiates to quiet the 

 cough and keep off haemorrhage, but his dreams were 

 always of his travels in the West Indies and the Rocky 

 Mountains and of the beautiful things that he had there 

 seen. 



Among scholars of textual criticism no name stands 

 higher than that of Professor Hort, who, in conjunction 

 with Dr Westcott, brought out the famous edition of 

 the Greek Testament. He may be taken as an illustra- 

 tion of that love of botany which not infrequently has 

 been associated with the highest scholarship. As a boy 

 at Rugby, perhaps owing to the influence of Dr Arnold, 

 he became much interested in wild flowers, and his 

 school diary contains a number of entries as to the 

 finding of uncommon plants. At Cambridge he was 

 fortunate in winning the friendship of Professor C. C. 

 Babington, with whom he would go for long botanical 

 walks, and under whose guidance he worked diligently 

 at the brambles and other difficult genera. After taking 

 a First Class in the Classical Tripos of 1850, he entered 

 the following year for the Natural Sciences Tripos, when 

 he again won a First Class, with " distinction in 

 botany." It was mostly his custom in after years to 

 spend his holidays in Switzerland, and the tours were 

 always arranged with reference to his favourite pursuit. 

 In time, as the result of repeated Alpine expeditions, 

 he collected a fine herbarium of Swiss plants, while his 



