*92..] 
THE ORCHID REVIEW. 
claims on his time and labour lay often and for long periods in other 
directions, and loyal to his duties as he was he never shunned them. To 
make up for what he had to forego in that direction, he cultivated in whatever 
time was left to him with assiduity the friendship and goodwill of the large 
guild of Orchid growers that is scattered all over the country, and he repaid 
them with his expert knowledge with a liberality such as the enthusiast only 
metes out and can afford to mete out. Of this* the pages of this journal are" 
witness. They have spoken for twenty-eight years.. Such men have never 
their true reward, rendered in the terms of commerce—he certainly had it 
not—and perhaps it is better so. He was happy as he was, although he 
sighed sometimes for more time and for more elbow room. Had he had it, 
and had it early, he might have risen still higher and freed himself from a 
certain timidity which only too often prevented him from coming to 
conclusions and was the cause of much unfinished work, it might also have 
led him from the purely and analytical and. discriminative work in which he 
certainly excelled on to the constructive results of a higher order. He had 
never travelled, and it was pathetic to see how at the age of sixty-five he 
planned a journey which should make up for this gap in his education as a 
naturalist. How he looked forward to that trip to Panama, which should 
introduce him into one of the Eldorados of tropical vegetation and yield 
him new spoils, unvitiated by the press or hothouse. Alas ! when will the 
time come when every herbarium worker will be required to serve a noviciate 
of serious fieldwork at home and in a foreign country ? 
Looking back over the many years during which I worked with him as 
my colleague and ultimately as his chief, there rises before me the figure of 
a man, absolutely upright and loyal, all devotion to his task, as he recognized 
it in the light of his intellect and his moral conceptions,, not perhaps a 
master mind, but of broader and sounder views, and wider interests than* 
he was sometimes credited with; thorough to occasional pedantry, somewhat 
angular, unelastic and difficult to convince, as self-taught and self-made 
men frequently are ; always eager to do his very best, a man every inch 
worth the position he held and the esteem which was accorded to him by 
those who were immediately associated with him as well as those who had 
otherwise come into contact with him personally or through the medium* 
of correspondence and literature. 
Those who wish for a more detailed account of his life may with* 
advantage turn to the obituary notice in the Kew Bulletin , No. 3, of this 
year (pp. 123-127). Here it may suffice to quote only the most important 
particulars. 
Robert Allen Rolfe was born at Ruddington, near Nottingham, on 
May 12th, 1855. He came to Kew as a gardener in April, 1879, and was 
appointed an assistant iu the Herbarium on a competitive examination in 
