The claim of Henfrey to rank among the founders of botany in this country depends less on his own original contributions than on a whole-hearted devotion to the propagation and diffusion of the newer methods and results which marked an epoch during the forties and fifties of last century. The outset of Henfrey's career coincided with a great turning point in the history of botany, and to Henfrey will always belong the credit of being the first Englishman to recognise the full significance of the movement. From that moment he unceasingly made known and diffused in this country the results of the German renaissance. That Henfrey should have failed to establish the newer botany in England was the result of a variety of circumstances, one of which was his early death. The available biographical material of Henfrey being extremely meagre, it has been necessary in preparing the present account to rely almost entirely on his published writings. In some ways this lack of personal details is no disadvantage as our present interest in Henfrey depends essentially on the movement in botany with which he was identified. Arthur Henfrey was born at Aberdeen, in 1819, of English parents. He underwent the usual course of training for the medical profession at St Bartholomew's Hospital--becoming a member of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1843. In consequence of bronchial trouble, to which he eventually succumbed at the early age of 39, Henfrey never practised his profession. Compelled to a life of seclusion he at once turned to a scientific career and more particularly to the pursuit of botany. In 1847 he undertook the duties of Lecturer in Botany at St George's Hospital Medical School, where among his colleagues was Edwin Lankester, himself a redoubtable naturalist and the father of Sir Ray Lankester, the eminent zoologist of our own day. Henfrey succeeded Edward Forbes as Professor of Botany in King's College, London, in 1852--a post which he held till his death. He was elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society in the same year. He died quite suddenly in 1859, at the house on Turnham Green, where he had resided for many years. In order to understand the part played by Henfrey, it is necessary briefly to review the state of botany in the first half of the nineteenth century. Linnaeus of course, botanically, the outstanding fact of the eighteenth century, was no exception to the dictum that "the evil that men do lives after them."