A. Gray—Memorial of George Bentham. 109 
associates, who knew him only as the recluse student, he made 
proof in age of the fine talent for business and the conduct of 
affairs which had distinguished his prime in the management 
of the Horticultural Society; and in his annual presidential 
addresses, which form a volume of permanent value, his discus- 
sions of general as well as of particular scientific questions and 
interests bring out prominently the breadth and fulness of 
his knowledge and the soundness of his judgment. 
The years which followed his retirement from the chair of 
the Linnean Society, at the age of seventy-three, were no less 
laborious or less productive than those preceding ; at the age of 
eighty (as the writer can testify) the diminution of bodily 
strength bad wrought no obvious abatement of mental power 
and not much of facility; and he was able to finish in the 
spring of 1883 the great work upon which he was engaged. 
As was natural his corporeal strength gave way when his work 
was done. After a year and a half of increasing debility he 
died simply of old age—the survivor of his wife for three or 
four years, the last of the Benthams, for he had no children, 
hor any collateral descendants of the name. 
A large part of his modest fortune was bequeathed to the 
Linnean Society, to the Royal Society, for its scientific relief 
fond, and in other trusts for the promotion of the science to 
which his long life was so perseveringly devoted. 
The record of no small and no unimportant part of a 
naturalist’s work is to be found in scattered papers, and those 
of George Bentham are quite too numerous for individual men- 
ion. The series begins with an article upon Labiate, published 
order in much confusion; his monograph left its seventeen 
hundred and more of species so well arranged (under 107 genera 
and in tribes of his own creation), that there was little to alter, 
except as to the rank of certain groups, when be revised them 
for the Prodromus in 1848, and finally revised the genera (now 
Mereased to 136, and with estimated species almost doubled) 
i the Genera Plantarum in 1876. Although the work of a 
nner, it took rank as the best extant monograph of its kind, 
