years was a representative of the town, doing good work for the poor, for liberty by receiving and protecting political fugitives and by insisting on the freedom of the press, which was considerably hated in France under the restored Bourbons. Nevertheless, year after year he taught well, and most of the great botanists of later years were either his students or his visitors and friends. As age crept on, De Candolle continued his researches, and got through the description and classification of a considerable number of known plants. These were published in a book which will always be his masterpiece. Honours crowded on him, the gifts of learned societies of all nations, and he visited most of the great cities of the Continent. In 1832 he published the second part of his work. He had great happiness with his wife, and his parents lived to great ages, content with the prosperity of their son, who was ever good and loving to them, and got his reward. He had a little estate, out of Geneva, at Saint Seine, and enjoyed it much; but, as years rolled on, the death of a son there, affected his tender heart, and he sold the place and bought another, called La Barrière, near Geneva. His eldest son, Alphonse, followed well in the father’s steps. Finally, when old age troubled De Candolle, he gave up his professorship. Ill health succeeded, but the man worked on at his great book, and even entered the political arena once again at a time of emergency. The winter of 1840-41 was one of illness, and he could no longer work. His friends were dying off, month after month, and when death came to him, he was content. He had been a good son, an excellent father, a loving friend, a true patriot, deserving everything that elevated mankind; and it is admitted by all botanists that he consolidated the science, and gave it a definite natural classification. De Candolle early in life grasped the truth that plants grow, reproduce, and arrive at maturity, not by accident, but according to natural law, and he soon saw that some parts of plants were of more importance to their well-being and multiplication than others. He was thus a follower of Ray, and he became impressed with the belief that in arranging plants, the resemblances of the most important parts and organs, should be considered before those of the less important. This manner of proceeding he called the natural method. It was founded upon the knowledge of the anatomy of the plants and upon their physiology, and the method required care and research. The artificial method of Linnæus enabled botanists to distinguish plants readily, by examining the most readily examined, and often unimportant, parts of the plant’s flower. It was not a scientific plan, but a ready method. It did not bring one plant into relation with another, showing the common method of growth and reproduction, but simply enabled one plant to be separated and distinguished from another, and this is the least part of botany.