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Richa rd Spruce. x i i i 
methodical habits peculiarly suited his work. In addition 
to this provision of these material accessions to our knowledge 
of the Vegetable Kingdom, Spruce’s service to the cause of 
humanity in his Cinchona work must always be reckoned 
as of his greatest. Sojourn in the American forests, whilst 
it fascinated did not stimulate him to be a dreamer of scientific 
dreams as it did his fellow traveller Wallace, and Bates and 
Belt; or, if it did, he did not write the interpretation. The 
few letters of his fitfully describing his progress to Sir William 
Hooker, Mr. Bentham, and other botanists, which appeared 
in the Kew Journal of Botany in the fifties, and which are 
marked by a clear and facile diction, show him as a shrewd 
observer, and as a naturalist alive to biological problems 
wanting solution for which the materials might be at his 
hand. But he never achieved any compendious account of 
his travels, through which he might have conveyed the im¬ 
pressions of his long American experience, and the glimpses 
that his writings give us of the keenness of his perception 
and of his critical faculty indicate that Science is in this a loser. 
The second period—that in England of the latter half of his 
life, when, as he says, he was ‘never more able to sit straight 
up or walk about without great pain or discomfort,’ and was 
obliged to work therefore in a reclining posture—was that of 
the production of the permanent records of his collections 
so far as he could work them up. His Essay upon the Palms 
of the Amazon is classical, but his chief publications are 
within the domain of the Hepaticae, From his earliest years 
this group attracted him, and his largest and most compre¬ 
hensive publication is that upon the Hepaticae of the Amazon 
and Andes, now generally recognized as the most important 
book upon the Hepaticae that has appeared in recent years. 
The titles of Spruce’s publications upon the Hepaticae hardly 
give an idea of the full extent of his work upon them and of 
its merit. Ostensibly descriptive and systematic, his writings 
are weighty in the discrimination of characters and in the 
adjustment of boundaries; but over and above this, they 
have the charm of deserving to be read between the lines, for 
