RICHARD SPRUCE 
(With Portrait .) 
The life of Richard Spruce impresses one as that of a man 
from whom the scientific world did not obtain all that he might 
have given. That it was not otherwise may be attributed 
to the demon of ill-health which overshadowed him from an 
early period in life, and which, if it determined the sphere 
of his work during that portion of his career which was active, 
crippled him as an acute sufferer during the later half. In 
all the circumstances we can but wonder that he accomplished 
so much. 
The story of his life is in brief:—Born a Yorkshireman, at 
Ganthorpe, in 1817, Spruce having a mathematical gift followed 
the profession of his father, and became for a short period 
a dominie. But his unquenchable love of natural history, 
more especially of the Bryophyta, backed probably by a tem¬ 
perament unsuited to the schoolroom, ere long weaned him 
from the desk, and the calls of health imperatively demanding 
his sojourn in a climate less rigorous than that of Britain, he 
spent a short year in botanical exploration upon the Pyrenees, 
and subsequently migrated to South America upon a like 
errand with the support of the leading British botanists of the 
time. Landing at Para, in 1849, he began a series of explora¬ 
tions and botanical collections which employed him for a 
dozen years, in course of which he traversed South America 
by divergent routes from East to West, passing but a few 
degrees northwards or southwards of the equator over a 
region—including many important rivers, some of them up to 
that time unexplored—extending from British Guiana and 
Venezuela on the north-east to Peru on the south-west. In 
[Annals of Botany, Vol. XIV. No. LVI. December, 1900.] 
