OBITUARY NOTICES OF FELLOWS DECEASED: 



George Bentham was born on the 22nd of September,. 1800, at 

 Stoke, near Portsmouth, where his parents happened to be at that 

 time residing, in consequence of the professional occupations of his- 

 father, General, afterwards Sir Samuel, Bentham, who then held the 

 important post of Inspector of Naval Works under the Admiralty.. 

 His mother, a lady of great ability, was the daughter of Dr. George 

 Fordyce, F.R.S. He was the second son and third child of a family 

 of five, all of whom he survived. 



The conditions of young Bentham's early days were hardly favour- 

 able to the settled routine of an orthodox scheme of education ; for 

 he was trained by private tutors, and never went to school nor 

 college. But although it was a life-long regret to him that he had 

 not been subjected to the associations and discipline of school and 

 college — to which deprivation, no doubt, a certain shyness and 

 reserve that characterised him may be attributed — his was not a mind 

 to run to waste even under the unsettlement of strong contrasts of 

 life and circumstances occasioned by the migration of his father and 

 family to Russia, and afterwards to the South of France, where the 

 administration and control of a large estate belonging to the father 

 were confided to the junior in his early manhood. 



As a youth he was an eager student in many branches of knowledge, 

 with a special aptitude however for the acquisition of languages : while 

 yet a lad of six or seven years he was able to converse fluently in 

 French, German, and Russian. Methodical habits and a capacity for 

 close and prolonged application to any favourite study appear to 

 have been ingrained in him from very early days, and, with his reten- 

 tive memory, laid the sure foundation of his future eminence in the 

 field of Systematic Botany. He was first attracted, as is assumed, 

 to this branch of science by the " Flore Francaise " of De Candolle, 

 the analytical tables of which, as an aid in the determination of 

 species, appear to have had a special fascination for him — falling 

 in with the " methodising, analysing, and tabulating ideas " which 

 he had derived from previous study of the works of his eminent 

 uncle Jeremy Bentham. The study of other works of De Candolle's 

 on the structure and classification of plants, and the personal friend- 

 ship and influence of that eminent botanist, strengthened Bentham's 

 bias towards Classificatory Botany. This indeed may, from about 



vol. xxxviir. b 



