Page:Dictionary of National Biography. Sup. Vol I (1901).djvu/153

Babington section in 1853 and 1861, and as local secretary at the second Cambridge meeting in 1862.

Babington's first independent publication dealt with his favourite study of botany. It was his ‘Flora Bathoniensis’ which first appeared in 1834, a supplement being added in 1839. The critical notes and references to continental floras which this little work contains indicate the main characteristics of Babington's subsequent botanical work. In 1834 he made the first of many excursions into Scotland, and in 1835, with two Cambridge friends, Robert Maulkin Lingwood and John Ball [q. v. Suppl.], his first tour through Ireland. In this latter year he records in his journal the commencement of his magnum opus, the ‘Manual of British Botany,’ the first edition, of which did not, however, appear until 1843. In the interim, in 1837 and 1838, he visited the Channel Islands, and in 1839 published his account of their flora as ‘Primitiæ Floræ Sarnicæ.’ In 1836 he was one of the founders of the Ray Club, of which he acted as secretary for fifty-five years, and he was on the council of the Ray Society, to which the club to some extent gave rise in 1844. The influence of the successive editions of the ‘Manual’ upon field botany can hardly be over-estimated. Sir James Edward Smith's acquisition of Linné's herbarium, followed by the long isolation of England during the Napoleonic war, had left the botanists of the country wedded to the Linnæan system and ignorant of continental labours in systematic and descriptive botany. Babington, in the first four editions of his work, harmonised English work with that of Germany, and in the later editions also with that of France and Scandinavia, each edition being most carefully corrected throughout.

Babington's interest in archæology was second only to his love of botany. The full journals which he kept throughout his life, and which were afterwards published {Memorials, Journal, and Botanical Correspondence, Cambridge, 1897), are, like those of Ray, half botany, half archæology. To the publications of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society, of which he was in 1840 one of the founders, he contributed more than fifty papers (op. cit. pp. 453-4); and having joined the Cambrian Archæological Association in 1850, he acted as chairman of its committee from 1855 to 1885. It was said of him and his cousin, Churchill Babington [q. v. Suppl.], Disney professor of archæology, that ‘either might fill the chair of the other.’ He was one of the ‘four members of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society’ who, in 1848, published an ‘Index to the Baker Manuscripts,’ and in the ‘Catalogue of Manuscripts’ in the Cambridge University Library, edited by Charles Hardwick (1821–1859) [q. v.] and Henry Richards Luard [q. v.], he undertook the heraldic and monastic cartularies; but, finding himself deficient in necessary mediæval scholarship, he made way, after the third volume, for George Williams (1814–1878) [q. v.] and Thomas Bendyshe. In 1851 he published, through the Cambridge Antiquarian Society, ‘Ancient Cambridgeshire; or, an Attempt to trace Roman and other ancient Roads through the County,’ of which a much-enlarged edition was published in 1883.

But Babington was still pursuing his researches in natural history. In his Channel Island flora, Babington had evinced an interest in the critical study of brambles which resulted in his publishing in 1840, in the ‘Annals and Magazine of Natural History’—of which he had acted as an editor from 1842—and in a separate form, ‘A Synopsis of British Rubi,’ which was followed in 1869 by a more complete work, entitled ‘The British Rubi,’ which was issued at the cost of the University Press, and the revision of which occupied the last years of his life. The study of brambles brought Babington into daily fellowship with Fenton John Anthony Hort [q. v. Suppl.] In 1846 Babington made his only excursion beyond the limits of the British Isles, visiting Iceland for a few weeks, and it is characteristic of the thoroughness of his method that the list of plants published immediately afterwards in the ‘Annals’ was revised, with full references to other workers, in the Linnean Society's ‘Journal’ for 1870. In 1860 he published his ‘Flora of Cambridgeshire,’ which set the example of an historical examination of the earlier authorities; and, on the death of Professor Henslow in the following year, Babington succeeded him. By that time, wrote his friend, Professor J. E. B. Mayor (Memorials, p. xxi), ‘his name in Cambridge stood by metonymy for Botany in general. Thus when a weed began to choke the Cam… it was christened Babingtonia pestifera,’ Babington's lectures were on those mainly anatomical lines that are now considered out of date; and, though his classes dwindled, he had little sympathy with histological and physiological detail. After his health failed he gave up half his professional income to his deputy, but retained his chair in order to save the university chest the increased salary payable to his successor. One of his main interests was the improvement of the herbarium of the university, for which he