BIOGRAPHY 
XXXV 
fine weather. But through neglect the disease had become in- 
curable, and the consequent weakness and continuous discomfort 
lasted during the remainder of his life. 
His condition before Dr. Hartley's discovery is shown by the 
following extract from a letter to Mr. Stabler (in 1867) : "I can 
hardly write in any other way than reclining in my easy-chair with 
a large book across my knees by way of a table, and consequently 
I rarely write anything but what is absolutely necessary." And 
in October 1869 : " I have made two attempts to complete my 
monograph of the South American Plagiochilae, but the sitting 
up to the microscope has brought on bleeding of the intestines to 
such an extent that I fear I must renounce the task altogether, to 
my deep regret. I have not looked through the microscope for 
many weeks." 
Yet during the succeeding seven years, with only slightly 
improved health, he did much botanical work. The most im- 
portant was a paper on the Palms of the Amazon valley and of 
equatorial South America, for the purpose of which Dr. Hooker 
sent him all the Herbarium specimens at Kew, those in the 
Museum being too bulky to render their removal advisable. The 
result was a paper in the Journal of the Linnean Society^ occupying 
118 closely-printed pages, containing a very interesting account 
of the geographical distribution of the species, and a new classi- 
fication of the genera, founded mainly on characters of the spathe, 
the fruits, and the leaves, as examined by himself during his 
fourteen years' wanderings. He enumerates and characterises 
118 species, of which more than half are fully described as new 
and for the most part discovered by himself, the characters having 
been carefully noted from the living plants. Dr. J. B. Balfour, 
Keeper of the Edinburgh Royal Botanical Gardens, speaks of 
this essay as a " classical one" ; while Sir Joseph Hooker informs 
me that it is " full of suggestions, some of which have been taken 
up by later authors." 
But his greatest work, and that which has established his 
reputation among the botanists of the world, is his massive 
volume of nearly 600 closely-printed pages, on the HepaticcE of 
the Amazon and the Andes of Peru and Ecuador. This appeared 
in 1885, as a volume of the Transactions and Proceedings of the 
Botanical Society of Edinburgh. It contains very full descriptions 
of more than 700 species and varieties, distributed in 43 genera 
and a large number of new sub-genera, all precisely characterised 
and defined. Of these 700 species nearly 500 were collected by 
himself (the number in the first four sets distributed being 493), and 
of these more than 400 were quite new to the science of botany. 
