XVI 



Obituary Notices of Fellows deceased. 



portrayed ; the various ways Government had hitherto been defrauded and 

 robbed have been found out and exposed ; if Dr. King's successors do not 

 take advantage of this it is their fault. The benefit which should accrue to 

 the Forest Department by Dr. King's labour, if followed up in a proper 

 spirit and with ordinary energy, is incalculable." 



Little more than a year after joining the department King was appointed, 

 on January 28, 1871, to officiate as Additional Deputy Conservator in charge 

 of the Kumaon Forest Division, and on March 2 he was recommended for 

 permanent promotion to this higher grade. While acting as Deputy 

 Conservator King was ordered to prepare a " Report on Forest Con- 

 servancy, etc., for Kaneekhet," one of the N.W. Himalayan hill-stations. 

 This report he submitted in June, 1871, and its nature may be gathered 

 from the ' Gazette ' of India for September 9, which officially states : " That 

 the Governor-General in Council has read Dr. King's very interesting report 

 with great satisfaction, and cordially endorses the praise bestowed upon it by 

 His Honour the Lieutenant-Governor. The recommendations contained in 

 it are excellent, and His Excellency in Council trusts they will be borne in 

 mind and carefully carried out." King further made a careful study of tea- 

 pruning under the conditions that prevail in the Kangra Valley, and 

 although it had reference primarily to the IST.W. Himalaya, a successful 

 tea-garden manager in N.E. India once remarked of King's paper that 

 " before reading it he had pruned with his hands, after its perusal he eould 

 prune with his head." During his forest service King formed extensive 

 botanical collections, and was acquiring the knowledge displayed afterwards 

 in his ' Gazetteer ' " List of the Plants of Garhwal, Jaunsar Bawar, and 

 Dehra Dun." 



The recommendation that King should be made a permanent Deputy 

 Conservator was accepted by Government. Owing, however, to there being 

 no vacancy in the IST.W. Provinces, this promotion, it was decided, must 

 involve his transfer to Burma. But before this arrangement could be 

 carried out King's forest service came to an end. Dr. Thomas Anderson, 

 Superintendent of the Royal Botanic Garden, Calcutta, and of Cinchona 

 Cultivation in Bengal, fell a victim, in 1869, to the energy and zeal with 

 which he had for years been labouring to establish plantations of cinchona 

 in Sikkim. He had to be invalided to Europe, where he died in October, 

 1870. On March 10, 1871, the Secretary of State for India selected King 

 as successor to Anderson (India Office despatch, March 23 ; Government 

 of India Order, May 22). On being relieved of his forest duties King left 

 for Calcutta and entered on his new charge, which included the Professorship 

 of Botany in the Medical College of Bengal, and where the tasks before him 

 were heavy ones, on July 10, 1871. 



Two cyclones of extreme severity which swept over Calcutta in 1864 and 

 in 1867 had ruined every park and garden in the neighbourhood. The 

 Botanic Gardens, formerly famed for possessing one of the finest collections 

 of trees in the East, had been reduced to a comparatively naked plain, 



