Page:Makers of British botany.djvu/271

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CHARACTER
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remember him, one gathers that Harvey was a very lovable sort of man. Shy and retiring, and diffident as to his own powers, with a deeply affectionate nature, he was equally prone to singing the praises of his friends, and to disparaging himself. "If I lean to glorify any one," he writes to William Thompson of Belfast, "it is Mrs Griffiths, to whom I owe much of the little acquaintance I have with the variations to which these plants [the seaweeds] are subject, and who is always ready to supply me with fruits of plants which every one else finds barren. She is worth ten thousand other collectors." Writing of Harveya, a genus of South African Scrophularineae which Hooker had just named in his honour, he comments, "'Tis apropos to give me a genus of Parasites, as I am one of those weak characters that draw their pleasures from others, and their support and sustenance too, seeing I quickly pine, if I have not some one to torment." He in his turn loved to commemorate his friends, or others in whom he felt an interest, by naming after them new genera of plants—Apjohnia, Areschougia, Ballia, Backhousia, Bellotia, Bowerbankia, Drummondita, Curdiea, Greyia, Mackaya, and many others. The names of some of his favourite authors are similarly enshrined, as Crabbea, Evelyna. Indeed, when at Niagara he saw an inscription to a young lady who fell over the cliff when gathering flowers—

Miss Ruggs at the age of twenty-three
Was launched into eternity,

he comments "Poor thing! I must call a plant after her—Ruggia would sound well." He had indeed a love of all living things. Writing to Mrs Gray on the death of her favourite dog, he tells how he felt so ashamed of being so deeply moved when in South Africa by the death of his pet ostrich, that he foreswore any similar entanglement, and kept his vow ever since. Of serious griefs he had many; the death of several beloved brothers and sisters who predeceased him, would have been well nigh intolerable to him but for the profound religious feeling which sustained and helped him throughout life, and which robbed death of all its terrors.

I cannot do better than conclude with some words in which