108 A. Gray—Memorial of George Bentham. 
Ambassador in Persia, and the next year he took up his resi- | 
dence in the house in Queen Square Place, Westminster, inher- 
ited from his uncle, in which Jeremy entham and his own 
paternal grandfather had dwelt for almost a century. The 
house no longer exists, but upon its site stands the western wing 
of the ‘Queen Anne Mansions.” e summer of was 
assed in Germany, at points of botanical interest and 
wherever the principal herbaria are preserved, the whole 
winter in Vienna. Some account of this tour and interesting 
memoranda of the botanists, gardens, and herbaria visited, 
communicated in familiar letters to Sir William Hooker, were 
printed at the time (without the author’s name) in the second 
volume of the Companion to the Botanical Magazine. Similar 
visits for iiesioal investigation, mingled with ‘recreation, were 
made almost every summer to various parts of the continent; 
in one of them he revisited the scenes of his early boyhood in 
Russia, traveled with Mrs. Bentham to the fair at Nischnit- 
Novgorod, and thence to Odessa, by the rude litter-like convey- 
ances of the country 
In 1842 he cee with his herbarium to Pontrilas House 
in Herefordshire, an Elizabethan mansion belonging to his 
brother-in-law, and combined there the life of a country squire 
with that of a diligent student, until 1854, when, returning to 
London, he presented his herbarium and botanical library to 
the al Gardens at Kew, where they were added to the 
still larger collections of Sir ‘William Hooker. After a short 
interval Mr. Bentham took up his residence at No. 25 Wilton 
Place, between Belgrave Sain and Hyde Park, which was 
his home for the rest of s life. Thence, autor holidays 
long interval. With such methodical habits, with pia 
from professional or administrative functions which consume 
the precious time of most botanists, with steady devotion to his 
chosen work, and with nearly all authentic materials and needful 
m Lees at hand or within reach, it is not surprising that he 
uld have undertaken and have so well accomplished such 4 
poet amount of work: and he has the crowning merit and happy 
fortune of — completed all that he undertook. 
Nor did he decline duties of administration and counsel 
which could rightly be asked of him. The Presidency of the 
Linnean Society, which he accepted and beld for eleven years 
(1863 to 1874), was no sinecure to him; for he is said to have 
taken on no small part of the work of Secretary, Treasurer, and 
Botanical Editor. Somewhat to the surprise of his roe : ie 
