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guardianship of a good and intelligent uncle. From an early age he 

 was devoted to field sports, which he followed with a minute at- 

 tention to the habits of his game, that belonged more to the natu- 

 ralist than to the sportsman. Bees were another favourite object ; 

 and he possessed that remarkable power of handling these irritable 

 insects with impunity, which attracted so much notice in Wildman 

 and others. He had in after-life the same privilege as to serpents ; 

 of which some members may recollect an amusing exhibition in this 

 room ; his secret being the union of gentleness and courage. 



" He was prepared for college by Dr. Neilson, the author of a 

 well-known Irish Grammar, from whom, perhaps, he derived that 

 intense interest in the antiquities of our native land, which charac- 

 terized him to the last. One proof of it deserves to be recorded for 

 example's sake. There stood on his property an ancient building, 

 described in Wright's Louthiana, as a Ship Temple, which the te- 

 nant was converting into lime. The young landlord had him prose- 

 cuted and punished for the trespass, to the surprise of many who 

 were in the practice of similar misdeeds. In the University he had 

 the good fortune to be placed under the care of the late Dr. Lloyd, 

 whose esteem and regard he possessed in a high degree ; though the 

 prevailing bias of his mind prevented him from equalling in mathe- 

 matical attainments some of his fellow-pupils. He pursued that 

 science only so far as it ministered to other objects. But in practi- 

 cal mechanics, in Chemistry, Physiology, and above all, in Entomo- 

 logy and Botany, he far outstripped his college contemporaries, and 

 while yet an undergraduate, his collections of Irish insects and 

 mosses were such as might have been owned with credit by a veteran. 

 But his success made him only the more conscious of his deficiencies, 

 and determined him to seek abroad the means of supplying them. 

 Having spent one or two summers in Paris, where he made very ex- 

 tensive dried collections of the plants of the Jardin des Plantes, 

 he established himself in 18 — , at Geneva, where, under the auspices 

 of De Candolle, he found all that he could desire. How well the 

 three or four years which he spent there were employed, appears 

 from the memoir on the Dipsacese, which he then published, and still 

 more from his Herbarium, of which the European part was then formed, 

 and compared with De Candolle's own collection ; a work, which when 



