Page:Allan Octavian Hume, C.B.; Father of the Indian National Congress.djvu/127

 the General Election in January 1910, was a source of much gratification to him, and, in spite of ill-health, he did much in that vigorous campaign. In December of that year he presided at the meeting of the Association when Mr. Evan Spicer was chosen to fight the Liberal battle, and in various ways assisted Mr. Spicer in his self-sacrificing attempt to win Dulwich for Liberalism.

"Even during his illness, when unable to bear the strain of many personal interviews, he wrote encouraging and inspiring letters showing his still active interest in the work in which he had been so long engaged. This loving interest was shown particularly in the selection and introduction to the constituency of the present Liberal candidate, Mr. C. R. Cooke Taylor. Mr. Hume's illness was brightened by the knowledge that many of the measures whose principles he had advocated for so many years had become law."



This memoir, as a narrative, must conclude with his work in a branch of natural science which, until his later years, he had not systematically explored—botany, the study of "every herb that sips the dew." Mr. W. H. Griffin, Curator of the South London Botanic Institute, which he founded and endowed, has been so good as to prepare an expert statement of his labours in this connection, labours which would have alone filled up the life of an ordinary man. In order to verify the existing catalogues of local plants, he used to spend his summer holidays in some important district, such as Devon, Cornwall, Upper Teesdale in Yorkshire, and the Peak in Derbyshire; and on one occasion I visited him at Looe, where he was engaged in personally investigating the Cornish flora, 113