Bentham,

Bentham, GEORGE, botanist, nephew of the jurist, was born in 1800 at Stoke, a village since absorbed in Portsmouth. The son of an officer who had risen to high rank in both the Russian and English services, young Bentham's earlier years were spent largely abroad, but from 1826 to 1832 he lived with his uncle, to whom he acted as secretary while carrying on his own legal studies. His Outlines of a New System of Logic (1827) is a remarkable book; herein for the first time is clearly set forth the doctrine of the quantification of the predicate, in which he thus anticipated Sir William Hamilton. Only sixty copies, however, were sold when the publishers became bankrupt; and the fact that the work contained this discovery was not recognised until 1850, although Bentham's claims have been fully vindicated since. Though called to the bar, he soon abandoned the law for botany. He had catalogued the plants of the Pyrenees (1824-26), and had been elected in 1828 a Fellow of the Linnean Society, and in 1829 secretary of the Horticultural Society. He now devoted himself to his new study, and soon published his important Labiatarum Genera et Species (1832-36). In 1854 he presented his collections to the Royal Gardens at Kew, where for the rest of his life he was engaged almost every day in his task of systematisation and description. He there elaborated the flora of Hong-Kong and of Australia, and in conjunction with Sir Joseph Hooker, completed his exhaustive and valuable Genera Plantarum (3 vols. 1862-83), which may be said to summarise our present knowledge of botany. His numerous other writings have done much to elucidate the flora of almost every region outside the Arctic circle. He died 10th September 1884. From 1863 to 1874 president of the Linnean Society, Bentham was a member of many other British and foreign learned bodies, and in 1878, on the completion of the Australian flora, received a Companionship of St Michael and St George. See an article in Nature, October 2, 1884.