[He answers some gardening chaff of Sir Michael Foster’s:—­]

Wait till I cut you out at the Horticultural.  I have not made up my mind what to compete in yet.  Look out when I do!

[And when the latter offered to propose him for that Society, he replied:—­]

Proud an’ ’appy should I be to belong to the Horticultural if you will see to it.  Could send specimens of nailing up creepers if qualification is required.

[After his long battlings for his early loves of science and liberty of thought, his later love of the tranquil garden seemed in harmony with the dignified rest from struggle.  To those who thought of the past and the present, there was something touching in the sight of the old man whose unquenched fires now lent a gentler glow to the peaceful retirement he had at length won for himself.  His latter days were fruitful and happy in their unflagging intellectual interests, set off by the new delights of the succidia altera, that second resource of hale old age for many a century.

All through his last and prolonged illness, from earliest spring until midsummer, he loved to hear how the garden was getting on, and would ask after certain flowers and plants.  When the bitter cold spring was over and the warm weather came, he spent most of the day outside, and even recovered so far as to be able to walk once into the lower garden and visit his favourite flowers.  These children of his old age helped to cheer him to the last.

***

APPENDIX 1.

As for this unfinished work, suggestive outlines left for others to fill in, Professor Howes writes to me in October 1899:—­

Concerning the papers at South Kensington, which, as part of the contents of your father’s book-shelves, were given by him to the College, and now are arranged, numbered, and registered in order for use, there is evidence that in 1858 he, with his needles and eyeglass, had dissected and carefully figured the so-called pronephros of the Frog’s tadpole, in a manner which as to accuracy of detail anticipated later discovery.  Again, in the early ’80’s, he had observed and recorded in a drawing the prae-pulmonary aortic arch of the Amphibian, at a period antedating the researches of Boas, which in connection with its discovery placed the whole subject of the morphology of the pulmonary artery of the vertebrata on its final basis, and brought harmony into our ideas concerning it.

Both these subjects lie at the root of modern advances in vertebrate morphology.