Vll 



question. The Irish priests foresaw the coming* struggle, and 

 demanded that their candidates should take the side of the Papacy 

 and the Duchies against Piedmont and the Revolution. This John 

 Ball, though a good Catholic, refused to do, and he was therefore 

 opposed by the Irish priests, and, after a hard struggle, he was 

 defeated." 



During the remainder of his life Mr. Ball devoted himself to 

 science as an accomplished and enthusiastic amateur, untrammelled 

 by professional duties, and with a sufficient private income to gratify 

 his love of travel, and of both physics and botany. He was further 

 an excellent linguist, gifted with an uncommonly retentive and accu- 

 rate memory, an experienced mountaineer, and he had, through his 

 connections and his early visits to the Continent, scientific friends in 

 most of the great capitals. Though by far the greater part of his 

 time and energies was devoted to the Alps, he made extensive 

 journeys in Hungary, Italy, Sicily, Spain and Portugal, Morocco, 

 Algeria, Tunis, the Canary Islands, and the United States, and a 

 cursory visit to the West Coast of South America and Brazil, every- 

 where collecting and observing, and forming friendships with scientific 

 men that were kept up by an indefatigable correspondence. 



Of Mr. Ball's scientific works, the most extensive were the Alpine 

 Guides. It has been well said of them by a most competent authority 

 that " In the history of guide books the ' Alpine Guide ' stands where 

 'Dr. Johnson's Dictionary' stands amongst dictionaries." The basis 

 of this work is of course topographical, but the geological and 

 botanical features of every subdivided area of the great chain of the 

 Alps are dwelt upon with such intelligence and accuracy that no 

 scientific man wouid regard his outfit for an Alpine tour as complete 

 without Ball's guides. He also wrote the greater part of the 

 ' Journal of a Tour in Marocco and the Great Atlas,' being the 

 records of an expedition made to that country in 1871, in company 

 with Sir J. Hooker and Mr. G. Maw. 



The ' Spicilegium Morse Maroccanae ' is the work by which Mr. Ball 

 will be best known to botanists. It is a virgin flora, the first ever 

 attempted of the country, which, and especially its mountain regions, 

 was in fact botanically as well as geographically previously un- 

 visited ; and the materials were almost exclusively those formed by 

 the members of the expedition. These Mr. Ball worked up with 

 scrupulous care, and by the light of his exact knowledge of the 

 kindred floras of Spain and the Southern Alps, with results that are 

 beyond criticism. In a botanico-geographical point of view the 

 unexpected conclusion was arrived at, that the Marocco flora is 

 European, not sharing (as it was expected to do) in the peculiarities 

 of the Canarian and Madeiran, thus confirming the great antiquity of 

 the latter. 



