﻿visit : " a thoroughly kind and good fellow." Torrey seems to have 

 been less favourably impressed : "I don't think Dr. Torrey saw 

 enough of him, at least in his own house, to appreciate him fully," 

 Gray says. The last mention of him is at a dinner party at Kew 

 in 1880 — "present four botanists, whose united ages sum up high, 

 for Bentham had his eightieth birthday just before, DeCandolle is 

 about seventy-five, I on the verge of seventy, and Hooker, the baby 

 of the set, in his sixty-fourth year." And on receiving the news of 

 his death, Gray writes, "We have nobody left to look up to!" 

 Bentham's botanical career seems to have been largely due to his 

 mother, of whom Gray, in 1839, writes at Montpellier, " Lady 

 Bentham has a collection of plants made by herself for her son 

 George at some interesting locality among the mountains, a set of 

 which she is to have ready for me, knowing, she says, that George 

 would surely offer them to me. Lady B., who is very aged, ia 

 evidently a very superior woman ; she is a very good botanist also, 

 therefore, as I do not know the plants of the South of Europe very 

 well, I am a little afraid of her." 



The tone of Gray's letters will disappoint those who value works 

 of this kind in proportion to tb abuses. The 



amiability of the author has prevented any censorious criticism 

 from finding its way into his letters : the most severe comment in 

 them being that passed upon Robert Jameson — "a stiff, ungainly, 

 forbidding-looking man, who gave us the most desperately dull, 

 doleful lecture I ever heard. It was just like a copious table of 

 contents to a book — just about as interesting as reading a table of 

 contents for an hour would be ; I may add just as instructive." 



His greatest botanical trial seems to have been the genus Aster, 

 the revision of which was one of his latest undertakings. "I am 

 half dead with Aster," he writes in April, 1880. " I got on very 

 fairly till I got into the tbick of the genus, among what I called 

 Dumosi and Salicifolia. Here I work and work, but make no 

 headway at all. I can't tell what are species and how to define any 

 of tbem, nor what the nomenclature is, i. e. what are original names. 

 I will take this group abroad, but it will be just as bad there, unless 

 I get some settled ideas before I start. I never was so boggled." 

 And again in the same month, " If you hear of my breaking down 

 utterly, and being sent to an asylum, you may lay it to Aster, which 

 is a slow and fatal poison. Apparently it will take a year or more 

 for me to finish it, with the greater chance that it finishes me before 

 that time." In December of the same year he writes from Kew, 

 " We are settled in our old lodgings, where we feel quite at home, 

 and here I am to polish off the Asteroidea — some very rough surfaces 

 in Aster yet to grind down"; and in the following February, from 

 the same place, "I am deeply mortified to tell you that, with some 

 little exception, all my botanical work for autumn and winter has 

 been given to Aster (after five or six months at home), and they are 

 not done yet ! Never was there so rascally a genus ! I know at 

 length what the types of the old species are : but how to settle the 

 limits of species, I think I shall never know." The genus turned 

 up again in the autumn of 1888, when he writes : " I am beginning 



