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 Rh thus brought upon him did not prevent his pushing on vigorously with the now large arrears of phycological work. His first action was to finish and publish the third and last section of the Nereis Boreali-Americana and then bring to a conclusion his enumeration of the seaweed flora of North America. This was accomplished in 1858, and in the same year he began the publication of the results of his work in Australia. The Phycologia Australica, which was issued in parts during the ensuing five years, ran to five volumes, each containing sixty coloured plates, and descriptions of all the species known from Australasian waters. In the year following the launching of this work, he commenced the publication of two important treatises on the phanerogamic flora of South Africa. In the first of these, the well-known Flora Capensis, he had the co-operation of Dr O. W. Sonder of Hamburg. This extensive work he did not live to complete; the third volume, which ran as far as the end of the Campanulaceae, being published the year before his death. The other work was his Thesaurus Capensis, a series of plates of rare or interesting South African plants, designed to supplement and illustrate the unillustrated Flora; of this he lived to issue only two volumes, each containing one hundred plates.

Harvey's home life, which for several years had been very lonely, was transformed in 1861, when, at the age of fifty, he was married to Miss Phelps of Limerick, whom he had long known. But almost immediately afterwards the shadow of death appeared, haemorrhage from the lungs warning him that his newly found happiness might not endure. After a summer spent at his favourite Miltown Malbay, on the wild coast of Clare, he was able to resume his college duties and his work on Flora Capensis. Although he never fully recovered his health, he laboured diligently at the works he had in hand. He had a noble example of continued devotion to science in his old friend Sir William Hooker, whom he again visited, on returning from a tour on the Continent, in the autumn of 1863, to find him, in his seventy-ninth year, finishing off the last volume of his Species Filicum, and "already beginning to nibble at another book." This was a further work on ferns, the Synopsis Filicum, on which Hooker was busily engaged until within a few days