618 
The late Sir B. T. Brandreth Gihhs. 
had to resign his office in consequence of illness. Examining 
the long list of public engagements — all of them unpaid offices, 
of which Sir Brandreth Gibbs's whole life was full — engage- 
ments occupying at least a month at a time twice in every year 
for thirty and forty years, besides occasional Commissions, also 
exhaustive of much time and labour, undertaken for our own 
and other Governments, I am very deeply impressed — as 1 am 
sure the reader is, with a sense of the great public value, espe- 
cially to English Agriculture, of the career — always as modest 
and unpretending as it has been useful — which has just closed. 
Surely there has hardly ever been a life more completely full of 
fruitful honorary services — life-long unpaid labour of the highest 
value, not only for its direct results, but for its great example 
of unselfish public spirit, "faithful" always to the "talent" 
entrusted to its keeping. 
Nor must we forget the services rendered to English agri- 
culture for several generations by the seed firm now more than 
a century old, of which for many years Sir Brandreth Gibbs 
was the sole representative. The business of this seed firm had 
till he joined it been carried on by the late Mr. Thomas Gibbs, 
who ultimately took Ben Thomas Brandreth, his youngest son, 
into partnership. It is right that this reference should be 
permitted here to the history of a firm to which, through Sir 
Brandreth and his predecessors, English Agriculture is much 
indebted. The father, Mr. Thomas Gibbs, had previously 
studied at Kew under the late Mr. Aiton, the Director of the 
Gardens, and it was he, I am informed, who under Mr. Alton's 
supervision re-arranged the Botanic Garden there, and in the 
year 1799 he was appointed Seedsman to the then Board of Agri- 
culture. Soon after that appointment, by desire of the Board, 
Mr. Gibbs turned his attention to grasses, especially for perma- 
nent pastures and meadows ; and he subsequently became a co- 
labourer with the late jNlr. Sinclair in making the investigations 
and experiments recorded in the Hortus Gramineus Wohurnensis. 
Mr. Gibbs's grass garden at Brompton, then stated to have been 
the most extensive in Europe, was open to Mr. Sinclair, who 
acknowledges the assistance which he thus received in the edition 
of his work published in the year 1824. In the same work, 
Mr. Sinclair, speaking of Kohl Rabi, then a newly introduced 
crop-plant, says that in 1805 Messrs. Gibbs and Co., Seedsmen 
to the Board of Agriculture, had raised a ton and a quarter of "its 
seed. Of Cocksfoot grass for mixtures to be sold for permanent 
pastures, he says the seed was first collected in considerable 
quantities by Mr. Rogers Parker, and by Messrs. Gibbs, 
seedsmen. Of the Cow-grass, he writes, " All the seeds and 
plants I had for this, except that from Messrs. Gibbs, which 
