of the museum, then under the care of his friend Parlatore, to which he planned to bequeath his library and herbaria. It was here that in the winter of 1848–9 he prepared his ‘Fragmenta Florulæ Æthiopico-Ægyptiacæ,’ which, however, was not published until 1854 (Paris, 8vo), owing to the Tuscan revolution of 1849.
After six weeks at Bagnères-de-Luchon, where he had been ordered to take the waters, in the summer of 1850, Webb revisited Spain to put some finishing touches to his ‘Otia Hispanica,’ and to visit his friend Graëlls, director of the museum and garden at Madrid. He had recently been given the order of Charles III by Queen Isabella, and on the occasion of this visit was elected corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences at Madrid at the same time as Leverrier.
In 1851 he returned to England, and in August, with his nephew, Godfrey Webb, visited Ireland, and, having received suggestions from his friend John Ball, explored the west coast from Cork to Killarney, Dingle, Tralee, Limerick, Galway, Roundstone, and the Aranmore Islands, the home of an interesting offshoot of the Iberian flora which he so well knew. After a year devoted to a synopsis of the flora of the Canaries, which he did not live to finish, and a second futile attempt to start for Tunis in the autumn of 1852, Webb again visited Italy and his friend Parolini, but was recalled to England by the death of his mother. In May 1854 he started for Geneva to visit his younger brother, Admiral Webb, but at Paris was seized with gout; and, though he so far recovered as to be able to superintend on crutches the classification of his library by Moquin-Tandon, he died on 31 Aug. 1854. He was buried in a mausoleum which he had built in the churchyard of Milford. The whole of his collections and herbarium, including those of Philippe Mercier, Desfontaines, La Billardière, Pavon, and Gustave de Montbret, together with complete sets of the plants collected by Wallich, Wight, Gardner, and Schimper, he bequeathed, with an endowment for their maintenance, to the Grand Duke Leopold II of Tuscany. The collection has a room to itself in the museum at Florence, where there is also a bust of the donor.
Besides the works already mentioned Webb was the author of many papers on various branches of natural history, the most important of which was perhaps his ‘Spicilegia Gorgonea,’ a catalogue of the plants of the Cape de Verd Islands, prefixed to Hooker and Bentham's ‘Niger Flora,’ 1849.
[Notice sur la vie et les travaux de Philippe Barker Webb, by M. J. Gay, Bulletin de la Société Botanique de France, 1856.]
WEBB, PHILIP CARTERET (1700–1770), antiquary and politician, supposed to have been born at Devizes in Wiltshire in 1700, was admitted attorney-at-law on 20 June 1724. He practised at first in Old Jewry, then removed to Budge Row, and afterwards settled in Great Queen Street, Lincoln's Inn Fields. On 18 Dec. 1727 he was admitted at the Middle Temple, and on 8 April 1741 was admitted at Lincoln's Inn. Early in his career he acquired a great reputation for knowledge of records and of precedents of constitutional law. On the suppression of the rebellion of 1745 his abilities as solicitor on the trials of the prisoners proved of great service to the state. He was the author of ‘Remarks on the Pretender's Declaration and Commission,’ 1745, dated from Lincoln's Inn on 12 Oct. in that year, and of ‘Remarks on the Pretender's Eldest Son's Second Declaration,’ 1745, which came out subsequently. Lord Hardwicke made him secretary of bankrupts in the court of chancery, and he retained the post until 1766, when Lord Northington ceased to be lord chancellor.
Webb was elected F.S.A. on 26 Nov. 1747 and F.R.S. on 9 Nov. 1749, and in 1751 he assisted materially in obtaining the charter of incorporation for the Society of Antiquaries (Nichols, Lit. Anecd. ii. 712–13). In 1748 he purchased the estate of Busbridge, near the borough of Haslemere in Surrey, which gave him considerable influence in that corrupt constituency. He sat for Haslemere in the parliaments from 1754 to 1761 (Carlisle MSS. in Hist. MSS. Comm. 15th Rep. vi. 207), and from 1761 to 1768. The first of these elections elicited in 1754 the well-known ballad, attributed to Dr. King, of St. Mary Hall, Oxford, of ‘The Cow of Haslemere,’ which had eight calves, for each of which a vote in Webb's interest was claimed.
In December 1756 Webb was made joint-solicitor to the treasury, and held that post until June 1765; he was consequently a leading official in the proceedings against John Wilkes, and for his acts was dubbed by Horace Walpole ‘a most villainous tool and agent in any iniquity,’ ‘that dirty wretch,’ and ‘a sorry knave.’ Webb was the leader in seizing, among the papers of Wilkes, the poem of the ‘Essay on Woman;’ and when the legality of general warrants was impugned, he printed privately and anonymously a volume of ‘Copies taken from the Records of the Court of King's
