Harvey now at last found himself in a congenial post, with a fair amount of leisure, and facilities for scientific work. He presented his herbarium of over 10,000 species to the University, which already possessed Coulter's extensive American collections. "I am as busy as a bee these times," he writes. "I rise at 5 a.m. or before it, and work till breakfast-time (half-past eight) at the 'Antarctic Algae[113].' Directly after breakfast I start for the College, and do not leave it till five o'clock in the evening. Again at plants till dusk. I am writing on the 'Antarctic Algae,' and arranging the Herbarium, and have been working at Coulter's Mexican and Californian plants." College vacations were now usually spent at Kew, staying with his best friend Sir William Hooker, and working hard in the Herbarium. On the way home from the first of these vacations, he went to Torquay, to spend some time with his old correspondent, Mrs Griffiths. They went out boating, he and the good lady of seventy-six years; and together they visited the only British habitat of _Gigartina Teedii_, six miles away, and gathered that coveted sea-weed in the spot where Mrs Griffiths had discovered it in 1811, the year in which Harvey was born. Another very rare alga which he received about this time, to his great delight, was _Thuretia quercifolia_ from Australia, one of the most remarkable of sea-weeds, bearing oakleaf-shaped red fronds, formed of a beautiful lace-like double network with regular hexagonal openings, which he was himself destined to collect in quantity some years later at Port Phillip, and to figure in his _Phycologia Australica_[114]. The circumstances under which this plant was found must have made Harvey's mouth water. "My specimen," he writes, "was picked up by a lady who accidentally landed for a few hours in a little harbour, into which the ship put during a gale, and she describes the shore as covered with the most wonderful profusion of plants and animals. She got all the pocket handkerchiefs of the party and filled them with what came first to hand, and in this hasty way picked up sixty different kinds of sponges, forty of which are new species, and several Algae, among which was the above described beauty. Her husband (a captain) is going out again, and promises to gather all he can meet with. Don't I hope he may have a run in again in a squall!" Harvey now commenced the publication of the first of his larger works on seaweeds--the classical _Phycologia Britannica_, a series of 360 coloured quarto plates, drawn on stone by his own hand, representing all the species then known to inhabit the British Isles, and accompanied by suitable letterpress: the whole taking five years to complete. This work represented an immense advance in the knowledge of British sea-weeds, and, by the beauty and excellence of its plates, did much to popularize the study of these interesting plants.