earlier in those days, and one summer evening after dinner at Wistow Sir Henry proposed an early adjournment to the garden : "Give me another glass of wine, first, Sir Henry," said the Rector. "Oh," said Sir Henry, sitting down again in a hurry and pushing the decanters round with some warmth, "if that's what you want I'll drink with you, foot to foot." The same clergyman owned some five or six hundred acres of glebe, over which he had given Sir Henry's gamekeeper the right of shooting on condition that he supplied the rectory with game. One day, when a messenger was sent to the keeper's house for a supply, he was sent back empty-handed, as there was none killed. The old gentleman wrote an angry remonstrance to Sir Henry, who was much annoyed; and immediately sending word to the keeper to go out at once, and kill all he could in the next two hours, he had horses put to his carriage and drove off with his load of hares and partridges, which he shot out at the rectory door, and drove home again. Sir Henry, it should be said, when he first resolved to try his fortune in London, had no resources of his own to rely upon. His father at that time was unable to assist him. He had no Fellowship, and he was obliged to begin life by borrowing two or three thousand pounds at exorbitant interest. The experiment answered, as we know, and from his own success Sir Henry drew the moral that there was no such stimulus to a man's energies, nothing so likely to lead him to fame and fortune, as to enter on his career penniless. He shared in that contempt for a small competence sometimes professed by men who want an excuse for their own insignificance, sometimes by those who, because they have succeeded without it, suppose they should have failed with it. That some natural geniuses have been choked by a competence, can hardly be doubted; but, we think, more have withered for the want of it. Sir Henry Halford, however, could not bear to hear such an opinion broached, and once grew so angry with a friend who insisted on the value of independence' that he almost drove him from the room. His niece, who usually presided at his table, helped, if necessary, to make up his evening rubber. He himself did not dine out a great deal in the neighbourhood, but was a hospitable entertainer, and kept the country alive. In dress, in manners, in demeanour, he belonged to the old school. He wore the loose white cravat fashionable in the days of his youth, youth, and was generally to be seen in the morning, when at Wistow, in a snuff-coloured or plum-coloured coat with a high collar, and sometimes with nankeen trousers made short to show the speckled socks underneath. Trousers of this cut we have seen on only one other representative of the old régime, the late Rev. Thomas Short, of Trinity College, Oxford. Sir Henry wore powder in his hair, and partly perhaps owing to this, partly to his figure, which never became corpulent, he did not look his age to the last. Sir Henry is believed to have been a sincerely religious man, though not without his failings. When, in 1844, the vicar went to take leave of him on his leaving Wistow for the last time, he found him with Mant's Bible spread open on the table before him. Of course persons will be found to say that this was only another illustration of the insincerity so often imputed to him. When the same action admits of two interpretations, the less innocent is sure to be the more popular. Sir Henry Halford published in his lifetime a little volume of essays and orations read and delivered at the Royal College of Physicians. Some of them were also published in 'The Transactions of the Royal College of Physicians'; others were written expressly for a mixed audience, and all alike were in English. Of the two Latin orations we have already spoken; and the paper relating to the opening of the coffin of King Charles I. is well known. Besides this volume, Sir Henry published only a few tracts or pamphlets, and the duty of handing down his memory remains with his profession. ART. ART. X.-1. Index Kewensis. Oxford, 1893-5. 2. The Popular Names of British Plants. By R. C. A. Prior, M.D. Second Edition. London, 1870. 3. A Dictionary of English Plant Names. By James Britten, F.L.S., and Robert Holland. For the English Dialect Society. London, 1886. 4. English Plant Names from the Tenth to the Fifteenth Century. By John Earle, M.A. Oxford, 1880. 5. Botanical Names for English Readers. By R. H. Alcock. London, 1876. То 10 those who know Kew as a beautiful flower-garden only, the first book on our list will be a surprise. Of the thousands who wander through the gardens in the course of the year, some few enter the Museums, and there may learn in an hour more practical lessons on the economic and artistic uses of plants than they could ever derive from the mere reading of books; some go through the late Miss Marianne North's gallery of paintings, and if they take the trouble to go through it on any system, they too may learn in the pleasantest and easiest way many lessons in the geographical distribution of plants. But very few are aware that Kew has not only the finest collection of living plants in Europe, but is also a great scientific establishment, where botanical and biological researches are being carried on at all times with a thoroughness and exactness that have made it the recognized head and model of all similar establishments in the world. In the tall red brick house near the main entrance to the gardens, formerly a royal residence and now the Herbarium, a small staff of well-chosen scientific men is at work, furnished with a large herbarium of plants, sent there for many years past by the most celebrated collectors in all parts of the world, and with an excellent botanical library. To that house all plants grown in the garden are sent for classification, and specimens daily arrive from all quarters of the globe in quest of identification. The work is incessant, but the results are excellent and far-reaching, and the latest outcome is the issue of the Index Kewensis.' It is scarcely too much to say that the Index is the most valuable aid to scientific botany which has appeared since the days of Linnæus. Botanists have been long expecting it, and their high hopes of its usefulness will not be disappointed. Though we have largely to thank the Kew staff for it, and congratulate the authors on the satisfactory completion of their work, yet our gratitude is in the first place due to Darwin. In his many researches he had to spend much labour in identifying plants plants sent to him, and shortly before his death he entrusted a considerable sum of money to Sir Joseph Hooker, for the advancement of botany and biology, with the special desire of lessening for others the difficulties which had so often hampered and delayed his own work. His first idea was an enlarged edition of Steudel's Nomenclator Botanicus,' a most excellent book in its day; but though posted up in an interleaved copy at Kew, it had fallen out of date, the last edition having been published in 1840. This scheme was soon found to be too great, and it was eventually and, as we think, most wisely determined to issue an Index and not a Nomenclator, the difference between the two being chiefly, that in an Index the synonyms are given once only in their alphabetical positions, whereas in a Nomenclator they occur not only in their alphabetical order, but also under each species; so that the size of the book and the necessary labour are almost doubled. Even as an Index the work is quite large enough; for nearly 400,000 names have been given, and some idea of the labour involved in the allotment of these names may be gathered from the fact that in 1887, when the work was still in progress, the MSS. weighed more than a ton. The plan of the book is fully disclosed in the titlepage,. which, as well as the short preface, is given both in English and Latin, and these are the only bits of English in the work. It is not an Index of all plants, for not only are cryptogams excluded, but flowering plants alone are admitted; nor does it profess to give all the names that plants have borne from the earliest times, but it starts with the time of Linnæus and ends in 1885, and for all practical purposes those two limits bound the practical requirements of botanical students. It gives moreover the writers who first named the plants, the works in which they were first described, and (a most laborious and important addition) their native countries. For the wonderful care shown in this' part of the work we are indebted to the supervision of Sir Joseph Hooker. Within the above limits the work is most strictly kept, and the gardener must not expect to find in it a dictionary of gardening or a guide to the cultivation of plants. The chief benefit conferred by the Index on botanists is the reduction in the number of genera and species. This was to be expected, for whilst it has been too much the custom in most of the gardens of Europe to multiply genera and species, it has been the tradition of Kew to reduce the list as much as possible. This has been so far carried out in the Index that it is probably not too much to say that the recorded names of genera and species species have been reduced by quite one-half. It would be hard to measure the gain of having the immense mass of synonyms of species-many of them apparently of equal authoritybrought into order, with a definite place assigned to each, and the one right name settled by authority. Botanical students know too well what hours, and even days and months, of labour have been necessary if they wanted to work out any large family, say the grasses. Formerly it seemed hopeless to wade through the sea of names given by good authors, and to find out which was the right one. Now the student is spared all that toil. In a few minutes he may satisfy himself, with little fear of being mistaken, and arrive at a conclusion, which it would have cost him much labour to reach, and which, when reached, might have been altogether wrong. The greatest benefit, however, conferred by the Index is that we have now, for the first time in the history of scientific botany, not only a thoroughly trustworthy guide through the mazes of botanical nomenclature, but a final Court of Appeal, whose judgments will most implicitly, as well as most thankfully, be accepted by botanists all over the world. Hitherto, one author was as good as another to the ordinary student; and if he found a plant well described and named, it was hard to compel him to search through many other volumes to find out whether it had not been better described and named by some other author. This dreary work is now done for him, and done for him in a way which he may trust. The search through countless volumes, not only of purely botanical books, but of voyages and travels, transactions of learned societies, pamphlets and monographs, and descriptions in gardening papers and magazines, must have involved labour which we cannot measure. Looking upon the Index as the highest point which botanical nomenclature has yet reached, it will be interesting to mark the different steps by which that point has been gained. We therefore propose to give a sketch of the history of the present state of botanical nomenclature, confining ourselves as much as possible to England; that is, to give the history of the scientific or Latin names of plants now in use in England, and then the history of the English names of plants. The two histories are distinct, though in a few points they overlap each other, as where the Latin and English names are almost the same, in such cases as Rose, Lily, Violet, &c.; or where the channels in which the two histories have moved are practically one, as in the old English Glossaries, where the Latin and English names are given together. The |