A. Gray—Memorial of George Bentham. 105 
music, in which he was remarkably gifted, to Spanish, to 
botany, and, with great relish, to society. Soon after, the family 
was established upon a property of 2,000 acres, purchased by 
his father in the vicinity of Montpellier. Here he resumed 
the intimacy of his boyhood with John Stuart Mill, who was 
five years his junior, and whose life-long taste for botany was 
probably fixed during this residence of seven or eight months 
in the Bentham family in the year 1820. About this time Ben- 
tham occupied himself with ornithology and then with entomol- 
ogy, finding time, however, for another line of study; for at 
the age of twenty he had begun a translation into, French of 
his uncle Jeremy's Chrestomathia, which was published in Paris 
some years afterwards, and he soon after translated also the 
fssay on Nomenclature and Classification. This was followed 
by his own Essai sur la Nomenclature et Classification, published 
in Paris. This, his original scientific production, was one of 
‘poke like a native. “A language always seemed to come 
0 him without effort. Meanwhile his leisure hours were 
siven to philosophical studies, his holidays to botanical excur- 
Sons into the Cevennes and the Pyrenees. In the year 1823, 
® Visit to England upon business relating to his father’s French 
_ “State, where it seemed probable that he was to spend his life, 
we : 
native country. He brought to his uncle Jeremy a French 
ranslation of the latter's Chrestomathia; he made the acquaint- 
Do of Sir James Edward Smith, Robert Brown, Lambert, 
Wie the other English botanists of the day; visited Sir 
william, then Professor Hooker, at Glasgow, and Walker Arnott 
r, “dinburgh; took the latter with him the next summer to 
roping where the two botanists herborized together in Langue- 
2¢ and the Pyrenees ; and, returning to London, he accepted 
stag at the same time pursuing legal studies at Lincoln’s 
n. 
re his first and last brief. In that year Jeremy Bentham 
