Page:Journal of botany, British and foreign, Volume 34 (1896).djvu/525

 489 IN MEMOEY OP HENRY TRIMEN. (With Portrait.) Henry Trimen was born on October 26th, 1843, at 3, Park Place Villas, Paddington, London. He was educated at King's College, London, firstly in the school and subsequently on the medical side of the College. Very early in life he showed a strong liking for natural history, and collected specimens of animals and plants with much ardour. His elder brother Roland was devoted to the same pursuits, and well remembers how, when it became a matter of necessity to make a choice among the "omnium gatherum" of organic objects amassed, it was solemnly decided that Henry should restrict himself to the study of plants, while his senior was to devote his attention to insects. Holidays and half-holidays were almost always occupied by collecting excursions in the environs of London ; and school vacations, with the annual visit of the family to the sea- side, gave golden opportunities for field-work which were never neglected. While he was still at King's College School he had begun to form an herbarium, and frequently visited the Botanical Department of the British Museum for the determination of his collections. He was then a steady and careful worker, and a careful observer of all the conditions of plant-life. He began his medical studies at King's College in the autumn of 1860. The winter of 1864 he spent at Edinburgh University, where, besides attending to his medical studies, he acted as clinical assistant to Prof. Bennett. He joined the Edinburgh Botanical Society, and secured the friendship of Prof. Balfour and many of the younger botanists of Edinburgh. He graduated M.B. with honours at London University in 1865, and for a short time he acted as district medical ofificer in the Strand district during an epidemic of cholera. It was in 1864 that I made Dr. Trimen's personal acquaintance. The Society of Amateur Botanists, which had been established in 1862 and of which some account will be found in this Journal for 1864, p. 287, was then in the best period of its not very long existence, and Mr. Newbould took me to one of the meetings and introduced me to Mr. Trimen and to Mr. Dyer — two names which were then, like their possessors, intimately associated. To a lad of eighteen, strange to public meetings and shy of strangers, these young men of twenty-one seemed superior beings — an impression intensified by a certain loftiness of tone which, in Trimen's case, soon disappeared upon more intimate acquaintance. Trimen and Dyer were the leading spirits of the Society, which, however, also numbered men who have distinguished themselves in botanical work during later life (of whom Mr. W. G. Smith is a conspicuous example), as well as others whose attachment to botany was but temporary. At this period, and for many years after, Trimen took a promi- JouRNAL OF Botany. — Vol. 34. [Dec, 1896.] 2 k