xi 



interest himself in the garden ; and his principal occupation thereafter was 

 the publication of the 1 Flora Brasiliensis.' 



Whatever the world could offer in acknowledgment of his merits Mar- 

 tius received. He was elected member of nearly all the academies and 

 learned bodies inr Europe, and kings and emperors honoured him with the 

 most distinguishing marks of favour. His election as Foreign Member of 

 the Royal Society was in 1838. He rejoiced in the esteem and friend- 

 ship of his most distinguished contemporaries ; and plants and animals, 

 and even a mountain (Mount Martius in New Zealand), were named in his 

 honour. But the most gratifying expression of homage and veneration was 

 presented to him on the 30th of March, 1864, the 50th and jubilee anni- 

 versary of the day on which he was invested with the degree of Doctor. His 

 friends caused a medal to be struck, with the inscription, " Palmarum patri 

 dant lustra decern tibi palmam. In Palmis resurges." And on the loth 

 of December, 1868, the remains of the departed were lowered into their last 

 resting-place bedecked with Palm-leaves. 



General Thomas Perronet Thompson was born at Hull, on the 

 15th of March, I 783, the eldest of three sons of Thomas Thompson, Esq., 

 a merchant and banker of that town, and for several years M.P. for Midhurst. 

 His mother was the grand-daughter of the Rev. Yincent Perronet, vicar of 

 Shoreham in Kent, a Swiss Protestant by descent, and one of the few 

 clergymen of the Church of England who joined John Wesley at the com- 

 mencement of his mission. The youth's early education was received at 

 the Hull grammar school, under the Rev. Joseph Milner, author of the 

 "Ecclesiastical History ;" and in October 1/98 he entered Queen's Col- 

 lege, Cambridge, where in due time he took his B.A. degree with the 

 honour of Seventh Wrangler — no bad start in life for a boy under nineteen. 



In 1803 he sailed as a midshipman in the ' Isis ' of 50 guns, the flag- 

 ship of Yice-Admiral (afterwards Lord) Gambier, on the Newfoundland 

 station, and was shortly after put in charge of a West-Indiaman recaptured 

 in the mouth of the Channel, and ordered with other prizes to Newfound- 

 land, where she arrived, the only one that had stuck by her convoy through 

 those foggy latitudes. In the following year he received information of 

 having been elected to a Fellowship at Queen's, " a sort of promotion," he 

 remarks, " which has not often gone along with the rank and dignity of a 

 midshipman." Trafalgar, for which he saw Nelson embark on board the 

 'Yictory' at Portsmouth in September 1805, closed the prospect of 

 active service in the navy, and in 1806 he joined the " old 95th Rifles" as 

 a second Lieutenant, and was among the prisoners captured, together with 

 General Crawford, by the Spaniards in the Convent of San Domingo, in 

 Whitelock's attack on Buenos Ayres, on the 5th July, 1807. 



After his liberation and return to England he was sent in the spring of 

 1808, at the age of twenty-five, as Governor, to Sierra Leone, through the 

 influence of Mr. Wilberforce, an early friend of his father's. Here his 



