XI 
George Benthani , F.R.S . 
culture. She was a woman of remarkable power of mind, 
who aided her father in his scientific labours, and her husband 
in preparing his voluminous official reports to the Admiralty. 
At the age of 80 she wrote a beautiful hand, and during the 
Crimean war, when considerably over 90, she commenced a 
series of letters to the Times , urging the adoption of guns of 
a large calibre, and other improvements in war-material, the 
inventions of her late husband, whose Life she published in 1 862. 
Not less influential on George Bentham’s career was the 
teaching of his uncle Jeremy, who imbued him with that 
love for methodical and logical analysis which is so con- 
spicuous in all his nephew’s writings. As has been well 
remarked in this relation, ‘ The same inherited aptitude and 
contemporary influences which produced a great publicist 
in Jeremy, yielded, by an almost accidental deflection, a great 
systematic botanist in his nephew ’ (Eulogium, p. 8). 
Environments were as favourable to Bentham in his 
scientific career, as were the qualities of his progenitors. 
He was one of five children (three of them girls), all of 
them precocious. They were taught to read by words, not 
by syllables or letters, and the two brothers commenced 
learning Latin before they were five years old. In 1805 
the whole family accompanied the father to Russia, where 
their education was entrusted to a talented Russian lady 
who could speak no English, whilst in Latin the boys were 
instructed by a Russian priest, of whom George in after 
life always spoke with great regard. Music, of which the 
latter became passionately fond, was not neglected, and it 
resulted in his becoming an accomplished pianist. Thus, 
having a remarkable facility for acquiring languages, Bentham 
could, at seven years old, converse fluently in English, 
French, German, and Russian, to which, by hard work, he 
added Swedish, during a detention of some weeks at Carls- 
crona on the voyage back to England. The said voyage 
proved a tempestuous and perilous one. Embarking at Revel 
in a Russian frigate, with a crew, few of whom had ever 
before seen the sea, they were tossed about in the Baltic 
