Page:Journal of botany, British and foreign, Volume 34 (1896).djvu/528

 492 IN MEMORY OF HENRY TRIMEN. he did in the lecture-room. I think that his life," he adds, " was, until quite lately, a very happy one. He was ahle to give himself unrestricted to the work he loved best, and in its practical appli- cation to the tropical gardens of which he was in charge for sixteen years was unquestionably most successful. He was free from family cares or pecuniary anxieties, and up till two years ago enjoyed unusually good health, while he had the happy gift of winning the affection and respect of all those with whom he had to do." On his arrival in Ceylon, Trimen threw himself with charac- teristic energy into the various branches of his work. This involved an entire rearrangement of the Gardens — a task the need and execution of which are well set forth by M. Treub, of Buitenzorg, a highly competent judge in such matters. The Garden, he says, was "for many years under the direction of Dr. Thwaites, a man of real merit, but who thought a botanic garden in a tropical country should be in some manner a reduced copy of the virgin forest. This system, more original than meritorious, excludes any methodical arrangement of plants, and necessarily restricts the number of specimens. Dr. Trimen, as soon as he arrived in Ceylon, realized the disadvantages of the plan of his predecessor. To distribute over an area of sixty hectares, without any order, a great number of plants, for the most part not labelled, was fatally to embarrass the scientific use of the rich collections that had been brought together. So Dr. Trimen did not hesitate to adopt a new arrangement of plants according to the natural system, and to label them as far as it was possible for him to do so. With branch establishments upon the plain and upon the mountain, the garden of Peradeniya has before it a brilliant future."* His life in Ceylon was very pleasant, any feeling of isolation being greatly modified by the visits of other botanists, such as Dr. Marshall Ward and Mr. H. N. Eidley, or of other scientific men, such as Prof. Ernst Haeckel, who, in his Visit to Ceylon, speaks warmly of Trimen's genial hospitality and ''valuable instruction" — " the seven days I spent in his delightful bungalow were indeed to me seven days of creation." In such company Trimen would take expeditions into parts of the island hitherto unexplored by him, never failing to discover some interesting novelties. This is not the place in which to consider Trimen's services to economic botany ; his annual reports show that he developed the resources of the Garden in every direction, and his contributions to quinology were important. But something must be said about his botanical work in Ceylon. As soon as he had settled down, he became conscious of the need of a flora of the island. In 1885 he issued a catalogue of the plants, with the vernacular names and references to ThwMtes' s Enumeratio ; and in this Journal for the same year he published a series of notes on Ceylon plants, in which were included many novelties : a further list of additions will be found in the volume for 1889. During a visit to England in 1886, he went carefully through Hermann's Ceylon Herbarium, the basis
 * Annual Report of Smithsonian Institution, 1889-90, p. 390.