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JAMES BACKHOUSE. 55
religious work and travel, but his journeys never extended beyond
Norway, where there is a consideral)le body of Friends, principally
amongst the farmers and fishermen along the coast, whom he visited
three times, and in whose welfare he took a warm interest. He lived
at York, at first in the centre of the city ; but afterwards, when the
business firm, of which, through the death of his brother, he became
the senior partner, purchased more extensive grounds on the south-
west side of the city, he removed to the village of Holgate, in the im-
mediate vicinity of their nurseries, and occupied there for many years
the house that formerly belonged to Lindley Murray, the grammarian.
At Holgate he and his son laid out upwards of a hundred acres of
ground in such a way that theu* garden is one of the regular recog-
nized attractions of York. They were amongst the first to build a
large glazed fernhouse, in which the exotic species could be grown in
the crevices of rock, and streams of water introduced. Latterly, they
have paid special attention to the cultivation and importation of Hy-
menophyllaceae, and have introduced a great many new species, and
planned a special house for this beautiful tribe, ingeniously constructed
like a natural cavern, glazed over the top, with graduated temperatures
to accommodate the inhabitants of dift'erent latitudes. But their spe-
cial forte has always been rockwork gardening and the culture of
alpine plants, and we believe that their collection in this department
has long been the finest in the country.
Mr. Backhouse was, in botany, entirely what we understand as a
field, in contradistinction to a closet, botanist ; and so far as we can
remember, he never published a technical description of a genus or a
species in his life. His special delight was in alpine plants. There
is probably no one amongst British botanists who has explored more
thoroughly the mountainous tracts of our own islands,—from Sutherland
southwanl to Derbyshire and Snowdon, from the Whitby and Scarbo-
rough moors westward to Counemara,— than he and his son. For
several years they interested themselves particularly in the genus
Hieracium, which was very badly understood in England till they took
it up,—collecting all the forms they encountered, and taking thera
home to cultivate; and Mr. James Backhouse, jun., duly published the
result of their joint investigations in his ' Monograph of the British
Hieracia,' which has been substantially adopted both by Babington
and Syme. Upper Teesdale, which is easy of access from York, and