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 Rh funds, had long since embarked on comprehensive schemes for the development of both science and art. To its activity is due the foundation and building up of many of the leading educational institutions in Dublin—the National Museum, the National Library, the Botanic Gardens at Glasnevin, the Metropolitan School of Art. The Society had established also professorships of zoology, botany, natural philosophy, chemistry, and so on. In 1848 the professorship of botany became vacant by the death of Dr Samuel Litton, and Harvey applied for the post. These appointments were made by the vote of the members at large, and strongly against his inclination, he had to enter on a personal canvass, of some experiences of which he gives a half humourous, half pathetic account in a letter to N. B. Ward, of "Wardian case" fame, who throughout life was one of his most regular correspondents. The issue was satisfactory, Harvey being elected by a three-fourths majority. This appointment placed him in control of the Glasnevin Botanic Gardens, of which Dr David Moore, so well known by his work on the Irish flora, was curator. It made him responsible besides for the delivery annually of courses of botanical lectures in Dublin, and also, at intervals, in selected towns in various parts of Ireland.

In the spring of 1849 Harvey accepted an invitation from the Smithsonian Institution and Harvard University to deliver twelve lectures on botany at the Lowell Institute at Boston, and others at Washington. The subject he chose for the Boston course was a comprehensive survey of the plant-world, from the point of view of the "progressive organization of the vegetable entity." The cryptogams had a place of honour, four lectures being devoted to Algae: it is interesting to note that the Fungi, which he designates "the most aristocratic of Crypts—fruges consumere nati," he placed immediately below the Flowering Plants, for reasons which, no doubt, he gave in his discourses. He sailed from Liverpool in July. Ocean traffic had been revolutionized since his last voyage from the Cape; instead of a dawdling sailing-ship, a steamer transported him in ten days to Nova Scotia; and with some of the old excitement with which he had started on his first climb up Table Mountain, he