MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR. 



purpose of tracing out the vertical range of plants in the moun- 

 tainous districts, a subject to which very little attention had 

 been previously paid. A great part of what is given in the 

 ' Cybele' under this head is the result of his own field-work. 

 For the last thirty years of his life he travelled very little, and 

 for many years before his death never spent a- night away from 

 his own house. For many years he sent regularly to the 

 Botanical Society and Exchange Club a large supply of the rarer 

 plants that came within the range of his daily excursions, 

 selected and dried with characteristic care. His own British 

 herbarium is a large one, and possesses a special relation to the 

 ' Cybele,' as he laid in the specimens mainly to exhibit not so 

 much the characters as the geographical range of the species. 

 When Topographical Botany ' was finished, he entertained at 

 one time the notion of making a ' Nunc dimittis ' bonfire of his 

 herbarium, but we all of us, from Sir Joseph Hooker and 

 M. Alphonse DeCandolle downward, protested .energetically 

 against the carrying out of the idea, and it was finally settled 

 that on his death it should be offered to Kew. One of the 

 special instructions which he has given to me, as his executor, 

 is that upon his death all his botanical manuscripts were to be 

 burnt. At one time he gathered together and cultivated a large 

 number of the rarer and more critical British plants, and to the 

 end his garden was to him a great source of pleasure and 

 interest. A biographical notice would certainly be very incom- 

 plete which did not take count of his merits as a writer of letters. 

 His letters were always thought out carefully, and so full of 

 matter so pithily expressed that, as one who is peculiarly well 

 qualified to judge remarked at his funeral, a selection from them 

 would be worth publishing on literary grounds alone. 



Next to Botany, the subject that most engaged his attention 

 was Phrenology. While studying at Edinburgh he made the 

 acquaintance of George Combe (whose estimate of his character 

 and capabilities I have already cited), and, through him, of his 

 brother Andrew and Dr. Spurzheim. This is not the place to 



