84 THE LIFE AND WORK OF GEORGE DON. 
1821, when he entered the service of the Horticultural Society, and 
was shortly after despatched as their collector to tropical Africa, 
outh America, &c. During this voyage, which occupied some- 
thing more than a year (from December, 1821, till February, 1823), 
he visited Madeira, Sierra Leone, St. Thomas’s, Bahia, St. Salvador, 
Maranham, Trinidad, Jamaica, Havana, &c., and his activity in 
collecting and sending home living plants, seeds, and dried 
specimens obtained for him the highest encomiums of the then 
Secretary of the Horticultural Society, Mr. Sabine. Many of these 
plants afterwards flowered at Chiswick, and were described by 
Professor Lindley in the “Horticultural Transactions,” &c. Mr. 
Don’s attention having been particularly directed to the introduc- 
tion of tropical fruits and the procuring of accurate information 
respecting them, and his visit to Sierra Leone occurring at a time 
when many of its fruits (then chiefly known from Dr. Afzelius’s 
Report to the African Society) were in perfection, he was enabled 
to collect materials for a very interesting account of them, which 
appeared in the 5th volume of the Horticultural Society’s ‘ Trans- 
actions,” under the title “Some Accounts of the Edible Fruits of 
Sierra Leone, drawn up by Joseph Sabine, Esq., Secretary, from 
the Journal and personal communication of Mr. George Don, 
A.L.S.” At the recent sale of the Herbarium of the Horticultural 
Society, specimens of the plants obtained by Mr. Don during this 
expedition, and which are valuable not merely in connection with 
his own botanical labours, but likewise as being, in part, typical of 
the species described by Messrs. Bentham, Hooker, &c., in the 
“Flora Nigritiana,” were purchased for the Herbarium of the British 
Museum. His brother David having succeeded Mr. Brown on his 
resignation in 1822, as Librarian to the Linnean Society, George was 
for some years domiciled with him. During the earlier part of that 
period he appears to have been occupied upon a revision of the 
_ genus Combretum, which was read before the Linnean Society in 
March, 1826, and published in the 15th volume of its “ Transac- 
tions.” About the same time Mr. Don also communicated to the 
Wernerian Society a Monograph of the genus Allium, which is 
published in the sixth volume of the Memoirs of that Society. From 
1828 to 1837 his time was principally occupied upon the “General 
System of Gardening and Botany,” or, as it was afterwards called, 
the “History of Dichlamydeous Plants,” consisting of four quarto 
volumes, averaging about 880 pages each. The original intention 
was that the work should include all the known species of plants, 
and that the whole should be comprised in four volumes ; but this 
