GEORGE BE NTH AM. 459 



and not much of facility ; and he was able to finish in the 

 spring of 1883 the great work upon which he was engaged. 

 As was natural, his corporeal strength gave way when his work 

 was done. After a year and a half of increasing debility he 

 died simply of old age — the survivor of his wife for three or 

 four years, the last of the Benthams, for he had no children, 

 nor any collateral descendants of the name. 



A large part of his modest fortune was bequeathed to the 

 Linnsean Society, to the Royal Society, for its scientific relief 

 fund, and in other trusts for the promotion of the science to 

 which his long life was so perseveringly devoted. 



The record of no small and no unimportant part of a natu- 

 ralist's work is to be found in scattered papers, and those of 

 George Bentham are quite too numerous for individual men- 

 tion. The series begins with an article upon Labiatce, pub- 

 lished in " Linnaea " in 1831 ; it closes with one in the " Jour- 

 nal of the Linnaean Society," read April 19, 1883, indicating 

 the parts taken by the two authors in the elaboration of the 

 " Genera Plantarum," then completed. Counting from the 

 date of the Catalogue of Pyrenean plants, 1826, there are 

 fifty-seven years of authorship. His first substantial volume 

 in botany was the " Labiatarum Genera et Species, or a de- 

 scription of the genera and species of plants of the order 

 Labiatce, with their general history, characters, affinities, and 

 geographical distribution," an octavo of almost 800 pages, of 

 which the first part was published in 1832, the last in 1836. 

 He found even the European part of this large order in much 

 confusion ; his monograph left its seventeen hundred and 

 more of species so well arranged (under 107 genera and in 

 tribes of his own creation) that there was little to alter, ex- 

 cept as to the rank of certain groups, when he revised them 

 for the " Prodromus " in 1848, and finally revised the genera 

 (now increased to 136, and with estimated species almost 

 doubled) for the " Genera Plantarum " in 1876. Although 

 the work of a beginner, it took rank as the best extant mono- 

 graph of its kind, namely, one of a large natural order, with- 

 out plates. In it Mr. Bentham first set the example in any 

 large way, of consulting all the available herbaria for the in- 



