Glasgow , 1820-1840. xli 
Of the Serial Works the first was the ‘ Exotic Flora,’ 
inspired by the interest he took in the Glasgow Botanical 
Gardens. It was commenced in 1823 and concluded in 1827, 
with 232 coloured plates, from drawings mostly executed by 
himself, of exotic cultivated plants. It was followed in 1827 
by his undertaking the authorship of the ‘ Botanical Magazine.’ 
Of this work thirteen volumes were issued from Glasgow, the 
drawings for the first ten of which (about 720) were by his 
own pencil. 
In the same year (1827), finding that his extensive corre- 
spondence with botanists and travellers abroad provided him 
with information of great value that might otherwise never 
see the light, and that his herbarium was at the same time 
teeming with plants unknown to science, my father formed 
the plan of himself editing a periodical for the diffusion 
amongst botanists of the information obtained from these 
sources. As a model he took Konig and Sims’s ‘ Annals 
of Botany,’ of which two volumes only had been published 
(London, 1805-6). He never stopped or stooped to calculate 
the time, worry, and cost that this undertaking would entail 
upon him, which occupied him for the next thirty years of 
his life ; for he had throughout no assistant editor, and was 
dependent solely on my mother, and at intervals on myself 
when at home, for aid in proof-reading, &c. The heavy 
correspondence it entailed was conducted by himself alone. 
Including the continuation of the series issued from Kew, 
these periodicals embrace twenty-eight volumes with 548 
plates, of which seven volumes with 247 plates, the greater 
number of them drawn by himself, were issued from Glasgow. 
These were the ‘ Botanical Miscellany,’ three volumes with 
152 plates (1830-3), the ‘Journal of Botany,’ two volumes 
with 44 plates (1834 and 1840), and the ‘Companion to the 
Botanical Magazine,’ two volumes with 51 plates (1835-6). 
the value of my father’s works, was, when he entered the service of the latter 
(1834), a pattern-drawer in a calico-printing establishment in Glasgow, aged 18. 
His earliest work was for the Botanical Magazine and leones Plantarum. He 
died at Kew, in 1892, in the receipt of a pension from the Crown (Civil List). 
d 
