Page:Dictionary of National Biography. Sup. Vol I (1901).djvu/152

Babington rapid time on record. He passed quickly through the various grades of the service, was first-class assistant in 1872, when he filled for a short time the post of vice-consul at Tamsuy in Formosa, and in 1879 was raised to the post of Chinese secretary of legation at Peking. In the meantime he had made three very interesting journeys in the interior of China. The first of these was made in 1876, when Baber accompanied Thomas Grosvenor across Yun-nan to Bhamò, on the Burmese frontier, to investigate the murder of Augustus Raymond Margary [q. v.], of which expedition he drew up a map and a narrative, forming the substance of the official blue-book issued in 1877. The second was an adventurous tour through the Sze-Chuen highlands in 1877, during which he visited and studied the language, spoken and written, of the remarkable indigenous tribe of Lolos, completing much that was attempted by Baron von Richthofen in 1872. A detailed account of this journey, enriched by a great amount of miscellaneous information as to Chinese customs and habits of thought, was printed in 1886 under the title ‘Travels and Researches in Western China’ (with three maps), as part i. of the first volume of the Royal Geographical Society's ‘Supplementary Papers.’ In 1878 he journeyed from Chungching northward by a new line of mountain country, occupied by the Sifan tribes, to the now well-known town of Tachienlu on the great Lhassa road, and wrote a valuable monograph on the ‘Chinese Tea-trade with Thibet’ (‘Suppl. Papers,’ 1886, pt. iv.) On 28 May 1883 he received one of the Royal Geographical Society's medals, with a highly complimentary address from the president, Lord Aberdare. In 1885 and 1886 he was consul-general in Korea, and soon afterwards received the appointment of political resident at Bhamò on the Upper Irawadi, where he died unmarried on 16 June 1890, at the age of forty-seven. In addition to the works mentioned, Baber, while in England during 1883, skilfully condensed a narrative of his friend Captain William John Gill's ‘Journey through China and Eastern Tibet to Burmah,’ which was issued in November 1883 as ‘The River of Golden Sand.’ A portrait of Baber is given in the ‘Geographical Introduction’ to this work.

 BABINGTON, CHARLES CARDALE (1808–1895), botanist and archæologist, was born at Ludlow on 23 Nov. 1808, His father, Joseph Babington (1768–1826), at the time of Charles's birth a physician, afterwards took holy orders. He had a fondness for botany, contributed to Sir James Edward Smith's ‘English Botany,’ and taught his son the elements of the science. The botanist's mother was Catherine, daughter of John Whitter of Bradninch, Devonshire. His grandfather was Thomas Babington of Rothley Temple, near Leicester, and his pedigree starts from William de Babington of Babington Parva, now known as Bavington, near Hexham, in the thirteenth century (Collectanea Topographica, ii. 94, viii. 266, 313; Topographer and Genealogist, i. 137, 259, 333; Memorials of Charles Cardale Babington, 1897).

After some private tuition and two years (1821–3) at the Charterhouse, Babington was sent to a private school kept by William Hutchins at Bath, in which city his father had been compelled by bad health to settle. Before going up to Cambridge Babington came under the influence of William Wilberforce [q. v.], a friend of his father, as he afterwards came under that of Charles Simeon [q. v.] He entered St. John's College in October 1826, graduating B.A. in January 1830, and proceeding M.A. in March 1833. During his first term Spurzheim lectured at Cambridge, and a Phrenological Society was formed, of which Babington became a member, but it lasted only a few months; the botanical lectures of John Stevens Henslow [q. v.], which he attended from 1827 to 1833, and entomology, proved more attractive.

Babington's first published paper was on Cambridge entomology in the ‘Magazine of Natural History’ for 1829; he was one of the founders of the Entomological Society in 1833, earned the sobriquet of ‘Beetles Babington,’ and in his ‘Dytiscidæ Darwinianæ’ in the ‘Transactions of the Entomological Society’ for 1841–3 took part in the description of the ‘Beagle’ collections. A list of his entomological papers is given in Hagen's ‘Bibliotheca Entomologica’ (1862), i. 22, 23; but all were published before 1844, and his collection was presented to the university. In 1830 Babington became a fellow of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, and he was for many years its secretary. In the same year he joined the Linnean Society, and paid the first of a long series of botanical visits to North Wales. In 1833, on the occasion of the first meeting of the British Association at Cambridge, he was secretary of the natural history section, and from that year until 1871 he was very rarely absent from the annual meetings of the association, acting as president of the