XXII 



Obituary Notices of Fellows deceased. 



his efforts were largely aided by personal friends, and in no branch of Ins 

 work was his magnetic influence more potent than in this. He imparted to 

 officers of Government, both civil and military, to missionaries, planters and 

 travellers some share of his own enthusiasm, and many of the most valuable 

 additions to the Calcutta herbarium were the result of his endeavours in 

 tbis direction. His multifarious duties left bim few opportunities for 

 personal travel, but he never allowed them to impede his constant super- 

 vision of the work of his botanical artists. He was thus enabled to bring 

 together a collection of specimens and drawings far surpassing in extent and 

 value that dispersed in 1828, and to take a considerable share in the task of 

 supplying material for the use of Sir Joseph Hooker, while that botanist was 

 engaged from 1872 to 1897 in preparing the ' Flora of British India.' It 

 was therefore fitting that when, in 1891, the botanical officers serving in the 

 different Presidencies were linked together in one department, King was 

 appointed the first Director of the Botanical Survey of India. In this 

 capacity he urged the necessity for the preparation of a series of local or 

 regional floras to supplement Hooker's great work. His proposals, after 

 being approved alike by the local governments concerned and by the 

 Supreme Government, encountered difficulties akin to those he had 

 experienced in connection with cinchona, so that nothing beyond what he 

 himself could accomplish had been done in this direction when he left India 

 in 1898. In the end these difficulties were overcome, and the work he had 

 shown to be necessary has already been partly accomplished. 



As Professor of Botany at the Medical College of Bengal, King was a lucid 

 and effective teacher, and in the course of study to which he subjected his 

 pupils he, with the approval of Government, effected at the outset alterations 

 which to his practical mind seemed improvements. The course, as he found 

 it, was modelled on those adopted in medical schools in Britain, where the 

 teacher was either content to coach his students to the point required to enable 

 them to pass an examination on some prescribed standard, or was prone, if 

 enthusiastic, to endeavour to bring his pupils to some approximation to his own 

 standard of botanical knowledge. The first method King held to be a waste 

 of the time both of teacher and taught ; the second, even if the laws of 

 supply and demand had rendered it desirable, he found to be impossible. His 

 students, with hardly an exception, were young men who had suffered from 

 what he held to be the injurious incubus, a western literary education; with 

 minds often originally bright, their natural powers of observation had been 

 inhibited and sometimes atrophied by close attention to the written word. 

 In consideration of the fact that the real purpose of their presence in college 

 was to acquire a practical knowledge of surgery and medicine, he deemed it 

 his duty to treat the subject he taught as purely ancillary to this laudable 

 end. His teaching therefore resolved itself, not into a course of Botany in 

 the ordinary acceptation of the term, but into a steady application of 

 botanical facts and truths to the training of the various seDses of his 

 students. If in the end they did come to know a good deal about the subject, 



