of his death in the summer of 1865; it was completed by J. G. Baker and published three years later. During the winter of 1865, Harvey himself became seriously ill, and, an immediate change to a mild climate being recommended, he and his wife went to stay at Torquay with Lady Hooker, and there he died on 15th May, 1866.
Harvey was only fifty-five years of age when he died, but he had won for himself a foremost place among systematic botanists. Life, as Lubbock has said, is measured by thought and action, not by time; and according to this standard, Harvey's life-cup was already full and running over. He had used to the utmost the gifts which he possessed. The capital with which he entered on his career comprised a critical eye, a deft hand, and that scientific enthusiasm without which no botanist ever travels far. On the other side of the account, he had two serious deterrants, a rather delicate body, and a complete absence of scientific training. "Apropos of dissection," he writes to Hooker in his younger days, "I am a miserable manipulator, and should be very grateful for a few lessons." From the beginning he had a shrewd perception of what lay within his reach, and what was beyond it. "The extent to which I mean to go in botany," he wrote at twenty-one years, "is to know British plants of all kinds as well as possible; to know Algae of all countries specially well; to collect all foreign Cryptogamia that may fall in my way, and to know them moderately well... My reason for choosing the Algae is pure compassion; they being sadly neglected by the present generation, though at a former time they were in high favour."
In the letters written even in boyhood we see foreshadowed the direction and extent of his future researches. "Exactly what he determined in youth to accomplish," says Dr John Todhunter in his Preface to Harvey's Memoir, "he accomplished; the work which he took upon himself to do he did, honestly and thoroughly; the fame which he desired to achieve, he achieved." He saw that his strength lay in discrimination, description, and illustration, and to these—the necessary census task which forms the groundwork on which great theories may be built up—he confined himself.
