since the time of Aristotle. Sir W. Hamilton reviewed Bentham's book in the 'Edinburgh Review,' lvii. 194–238, but did not mention this discovery.
On several matters of jurisprudence Bentham held and put forward decided views in opposition to his uncle. His paper on codification attracted the attention of Brougham, Hume, and O'Connell; his suggestions on the larceny laws drew a complimentary letter from Peel, and a long comment from Brougham. A pamphlet on the law of real property, dealing with the Registration Bill of 1831, showed the same mastery of details that was afterwards so conspicuous in his botanical writings. But the death of his father (1831) and uncle (1832) set Bentham at liberty to follow the pursuit which had been strengthening its hold upon him in spite of the attractions of law and logic, and to become one of the greatest systematic botanists that England has produced.
For fifty years botany was Bentham's main occupation. From his own account of the development of his ideas (Brit Ass. Rep. 1874) we learn that he regarded as essential to a good knowledge of systematic botany, not only the life-history and distribution of races of plants, but also the results of vegetable physiology and palaeontology. He was himself a link between the adolescent and the more mature stages of his science, having in his early days conversed with one of Linnaeus's active correspondents, Gouan of Montpellier, having received many useful hints from A. L. de Jussieu, founder of the natural system, and having been intimate with the chief promoters and improvers of that system, such as De Candolle, Brown, Endlicher, Lindley, and Hooker. At the close of his career Bentham could say that he had received friendly assistance, personally or by letter, from almost every systematic botanist of note in the nineteenth century.
In 1828 Bentham's herbarium arrived from France, and in the same year he was elected a fellow of the Linnean Society, and regularly attended its meetings. He was proposed at the Royal Society in 1829 by Robert Brown, but at his recommendation withdrew, with other scientific candidates, who regarded with dissatisfaction the election of a royal duke to the presidency of the society. By spending several long vacations on the continent Bentham knew by 1832 the principal continental botanists, and the working of the botanical establishments of Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Munich, and Geneva. Botany grew more interesting to him as it became generally agreed that its main object was not finding out the name of a plant, but determining its relations and affinities, as well as its structure.
In 1829 began Bentham's connection with the Horticultural Society as honorary secretary, which office he retained till 1840. The society at this time had sent out collectors to various countries, and Bentham, with Lindley, the assistant secretary, who became his attached friend, named and described many of the species they brought back. Many plants which have become very common, such as eschscholtzia and clarkia, were introduced by Douglas, and described, with beautiful coloured plates, by Bentham. Further, his management of the society was so successful that he raised it from a perilous state of debt and dissension to a flourishing condition, both financially and scientifically. His 'Plantæ Hartwegianæ,' London, 1839–67, formed another valuable result of his connection with the Horticultural Society, being an account of the collections made in Mexico and California by Hartweg, a collector for the society. Early in Bentham's botanical career Dr. Wallich's return from India with the great collections of the East India Company afforded him a rich supply of material, and led to his study and publication of various more or less exhaustive memoirs of genera and natural orders of Indian plants. Of these the 'Labiatarum Genera et Species,' 1832–36, and 'Scrophularineæ Indicæ,' 1835, were the most important, the former order having been in a state of chaos before he took it in hand.
In 1834 Bentham married the daughter of Sir Harford Brydges, formerly British ambassador at the court of Persia, and in 1834 he removed to his late uncle's house in Queen Square Place, on the site of which the Bentham wing of Queen Anne's Mansions now stands. There he resided till 1842, when, in order to accommodate his extensive herbarium and library, and devote himself more fully to science, he removed to Pontrilaa House, Hereford, where he revised the 'Labiatæ,' and elaborated the great families of scrophularineæ, ericaceæ, polemoniaceæ and others, for his friend Alphonse de Candolle's continuation of the great 'Prodromus of the Vegetable Kingdom.'
In 1854, finding that the expenses of his collections and books were exceeding his means, he presented these (valued at 6,000l.) to Kew Gardens, and even contemplated abandoning botany, still regarding himself, with chacteristic modesty, as an amateur rather than a professional botanist. But fortunately the entreaties of his friends, Sir J. W. Hooker and Dr. Lindley (the former offering him a room at Kew and the
