Sir George King. 



xix 



the artistic standpoint to the average European, are readily appreciated by- 

 intelligent native visitors. His operations were controlled with a singular 

 prescience for ultimate effects and his years of unremitting toil were amply 

 rewarded. The whole place bears the impress of King's influence and care, 

 and the charm and beauty of its lakes and groves, its avenues and lawns for 

 which the Eoyal Garden at Calcutta is now so justly famed, serve as an 

 adequate memorial to his energy, patience and skill as a landscape gardener. 



King's work in the Botanic Garden by no means exhausts his achievements 

 in this direction. Shortly after his return to India in 1873 the amenities of 

 Calcutta were enhanced by the addition of a zoological garden. King was 

 appointed an original member of its Committee of Management, the 

 Lieutenant-Governor in person serving as President. The site selected was 

 occupied by a collection of miserable native huts ; in a few years, under 

 King's skilful guidance, it became one of the most attractive public resorts 

 in India. Very soon afterwards the site of a summer resideuce for the 

 Lieutenant-Governor was acquired at Darjeeling. The demesne in which the 

 mansion stands was laid out under King's eye and the consummate art with 

 which he employed the constituents of a natural forest and blended the 

 effects produced within the area treated with those to be obtained from 

 adjacent hill slopes and distant views has rendered these grounds at once the 

 ideal of what such a place should be and the despair of those who would 

 repeat the results. Again, in 1879, when, with the help of private 

 munificence, Government was able to provide at Darjeeling a temperate 

 annexe to the Botanic' Garden at Calcutta, King was given administrative 

 charge of this new garden. By a combination of the methods employed for 

 the " Shrubbery " grounds at Darjeeling with those applied to the Zoological 

 Garden at Calcutta, King in a few years created another place of public resort 

 at once beautiful and instructive. 



When King resumed charge of the Cinchona Department in 1873, he 

 found that a quinologist had been appointed ; he was, therefore, for the 

 moment relieved of his anxiety with regard to factory operations. The officer 

 appointed, Mr. C. H. Wood, devised a satisfactory method of extracting the 

 mixed alkaloids from cinchona bark, and to King fell the delicate duty of 

 creating a market for the resulting product, known as Cinchona Febrifuge. 

 He brought to this task all the qualifications of an expert business man, 

 surmounting every difficulty, and firmly establishing the distribution of the 

 article on commercial, as opposed to eleemosynary, lines. But on October 13, 

 1877, Wood was transferred to Calcutta and King was placed in administra- 

 tive charge of the factory, and in August, 1879, Wood, for domestic reasons, 

 resigned Government service. When Wood retired he had not yet devised 

 an economic method of separating quinine ; he had, however, left his process 

 for extracting febrifuge in excellent working order. In Mr. J. A. Gammie, 

 the resident manager of the plantation, King had an able and resourceful 

 lieutenant, who had worked in conjunction with Wood and was thoroughly 

 competent to conduct Wood's febrifuge process. 



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