Ixxxi 
West Park and Kew , 1841-1865. 
undisturbed for forty- two years h From that date the two 
botanists may be said to have hunted in couples for the 
aggrandizement of their libraries and collections, sharing their 
duplicates, Mr. Bentham giving my father the preference in 
all cases of purchase, &c. The one great difference between 
their aims was, that the former confined his herbarium to 
flowering plants, whilst my father’s rapidly grew to be the 
richest in the world in both flowering and flowerless plants. 
The offer of this gift was prearranged with my father, who 
with his wonted disinterestedness put aside the obvious fact, 
that its acceptance would greatly diminish the value of his 
own herbarium and library, should the Government ever 
contemplate its purchase 2 . 
The principal additions to the Herbarium and Library made 
during the last ten years of the Director’s life were : — 
(1) The large collection made in North-West India, Kash- 
mere, and Little Thibet by Dr. Thomson, and in the East 
Himalaya, the Khasia, Mount Silhet, and Chittagong by 
Dr. Thomson and myself. 
(2) In 1858 seven wagon-loads of collections from the 
cellars of the India House in Leadenhall Street, where 
they had been accumulating for many years. They arrived 
at Kew in the chests in which they had been packed 
in India, many of them partly open and their contents de- 
stroyed by vermin and damp. Amongst the most valuable 
of these herbaria were those of Falconer in the North-West 
Himalaya (in the worst condition), of Griffith in Afghanistan, 
Assam, Bhotan, Burma, and the Malay Peninsula, and of 
Heifer in Tenasserim. 
(3) In 1862 the herbarium of W. Borrer, F.R.S., long 
the Nestor of British botanists, and the life-long friend 
1 See Annals of Botany, vol. xii, p. 7. 
2 My father’s herbarium had been offered to Government on several occasions, 
for a sum far below its value. After his death, it was (in 1866) purchased, 
with all such books, about 1,000 volumes (some of great rarity), as were not in 
Bentham’s gift, together with a unique collection of botanical drawings, maps, 
MSS., portraits of botanists, and letters from his botanical correspondents from 
1806-65, which amount to about 27,000. 
