Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Second Supplement, volume 1.djvu/238

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Brandis
218
Bray

commenced by Dr. John Lindsay Stewart. Prepared at Kew, this work, published in March 1874, established Brandis's botanical reputation; he was elected F.R.S. on 3 June 1875, and appointed C.I.E. on 1 Jan. 1878. After his return to India he founded in 1878 at Dehra Dun a school for native foresters. During 1881-3 he inaugurated a sound system of forest management in Madras. On 24 April 1883 he retired from Indian service, with a special honorarium and valedictory notice. As administrator and as professional forester he had proved himself equally eminent.

Settling in Bonn, Brandis, who inherited his mother's social interests, instituted a workmen's club. At the same time he resumed his botanical studies, working on specimens collected by himself or communicated from Calcutta. While Brandis had been absent from Simla on duty at Madras during 1881-3, it had been proposed to substitute an English for a continental training of forestry officers in India. Accordingly in 1885 a forestry school was established at Coopers Hill, and although Brandis thought the step to be premature, he joined the board of visitors. On 16 Feb. 1887 he was promoted K.C.I.E. On 10 Oct. following Brandis agreed to supervise the practical continental training of English students. He performed this duty from 1888 to 1896, not only for English students but also for the young foresters of the U.S.A. forest department. His services and expert knowledge were recognised by the honorary degree of LL.D. from Edinburgh in 1889, and the grade of a Prussian 'professor' in 1890. In 1898 his university gave him a jubilee diploma; on 22 Nov. 1905 he received a message of thanks from Theodore Roosevelt, the president of the United States.

After 1896 Brandis again confined his attention to botanical work, dividing his time from 1897 to 1900 between London and Bonn. In 1901 he settled in Kew in order to prepare a botanical forest manual. There he resided till November 1906, when he finally returned to Bonn.

His great work, 'Indian Trees,' which he completed while suffering from a painful malady, was issued in London in November 1906. It is a model of botanical exactitude and a monument of enthusiasm and perseverance.

Brandis died at Bonn on 29 May 1907, and was buried in the family grave in the old cemetery.

His first wife had died at Simla in 1863, and in 1867 he married secondly, at Bonn, Katharine, daughter of Dr. Rudolph Hasse. By his second marriage Brandis had four sons and three daughters; three children died young. The eldest, Joachim, is a civil engineer; Bernhard is judge in the higher court of Elberfeld; Caroline is a sister in the Evangelische Diakonie Verein. A pastel portrait, made in 1867 by G. H. Siebert of Godesberg, is now at Elberfeld.

[Meyer, Konversations-Lexikon, iii. 384; Brandis, Forest Flora of North-west and Central India, preface, pp. xiv, xvi; Eardley-Wilmot, Indian Forester, xxxiii. 305; B. D. J[ackson], Proc. Linn. Soc. Lond. 1907-8, p. 46; Pinchot, Proc. Soc. Amer. For. iii. 54; W. S[chlich], Proc. Roy. Soc. lxxx. obit. not. p. iii; India Office Records; Letters of Lady Brandis.]

D. P-n.


BRAY, Mrs. CAROLINE (1814–1905), friend of George Eliot and author, eighth and youngest child of James Hennell (d. 1816), traveller and afterwards partner in the mercantile house of Fazy & Co., Manchester, and his wife Elizabeth, daughter of Joel Marshall of Loughborough, was born at 2 St. Thomas's Square, Hackney, London, on 4 June 1814. Her brother Charles Christian [q. v.] and her sisters Mary [q. v.] and Sara [see below] won distinction as writers. Caroline was educated at home, and her home life probably suggested to George Eliot that of the Meyrick family in 'Daniel Deronda.' Caroline was for a short time a governess, and the experience was helpful to her later in writing schoolbooks. She married on 26 April 1836 Charles Bray [q.v.], a ribbon manufacturer of Coventry. The Hennells were Unitarians of the school of Priestley, but Bray, like her own brothers and sisters, held more advanced views, which Mrs. Bray never wholly shared.

In 1841 Mrs. Bray and her sister Sara were introduced to Mary Anne Evans (to be known later as George Eliot the novelist), and the acquaintance quickly ripened into close friendship. Portraits of Miss Evans and of her father, drawn by Mrs. Bray in 1842, were presented by the artist to the National Portrait Gallery in 1899. The correspondence with George Eliot, which began in 1842, only ceased with life, and on it Mr. J. W. Cross's biography of George Eliot is largely based.

In 1840 Charles Bray bought a small property near Coventry known as Rosehill, and there entertained many interesting visitors. Emerson stayed there in 1848 (cf. M. D. Conway, Emerson at Home and Abroad, 1882, pp. 273-5) ; Herbert Spencer in 1852, 1853, 1856, and 1862 (cf. Herbert Spencer, An Autobiography, 1904). Bray