was not blunted nor the warm heart grown cold. There was even an apparent slight recovery in his health. About a week before his death he and his beloved wife, herself an invalid for many years, were well enough to leave the house and attend a public gathering, where friends crowded round them and congratulated them on their appearing once more in their midst. But it was the last flicker of the expiring taper. Perhaps the excitement, combined with the great heat of the weather, for it was now the height of the torrid Australian summer, proved too much for his strength. He was taken suddenly ill, and lingered between life and death for some days, surrounded by his family and remaining conscious and calm. Sundown, the sundown for which in the gathering shadows he had longed, came at last on Sunday, December the 29th, 1907, when the labourer entered into his eternal rest.
Alfred William Howitt was born at Nottingham in England in 1830.[1] His parents were William and Mary Howitt, the well-known and popular writers. The father, a native of the delightful little village of Heanor in Derbyshire, engaged in the business of an apothecary at Nottingham, but finally devoted himself to literature, pouring out a long series of volumes. Soon after his marriage Mr. Howitt and his wife made a tour on foot to Scotland, a rare, almost unprecedented, undertaking in those days. In 1840, when Alfred was ten years old, the parents went
- ↑ For most of the facts in the following sketch of Dr. Howitt's life I am indebted to an obituary notice of him by his friend and disciple, Professor W. Baldwin Spencer, which appeared in The Victorian Naturalist, vol. xxiv., No. 12, April, 1908. I have also made some use of an obituary notice published in the Australian paper, The Argus, Monday, March 9th, 1908, p. 7. My notice of Dr. Howitt's explorations in Central Australia is taken mainly from his own reminiscences, as these have been graphically recorded by him in the address which he delivered as President of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science at Adelaide in 1907. The account of his last illness and death is derived from letters written to me by his daughter Miss Mary E. B. Howitt.
