work was accomplished. The twelve years of his official life were filled with professional duties, difficult and dangerous exploration, management of the Botanic Gardens, and the labours entailed in making and caring for extensive collections. It would not have been surprising had Griffith, in spite of his attainments, contributed nothing to scientific botany beyond rendering these collections available for other workers. He estimated his collection of plants at more than twelve thousand species; and on his travels he did not neglect other collections of interest. Insects obtained by him are described, he collected the birds and fish in every district he visited; indeed he was a keen fisherman and must have thrown a fly in many a stream that had not been fished before, combining sport and science.
Griffith's collections were made with the definite purpose of enabling him, when he had leisure, to produce a general account of the Indian flora on a geographical basis. His methods of collecting were most enlightened and subserved his work as a morphologist and a student of the conditions of occurrence of the plants, not merely of formal systematic botany. The journals he kept on all expeditions are full of references to the occurrence of the plants met with. He often adopted a plan of roughly mapping each day's route and indicating the plants and associations of plants, along the line of march. I wonder if modern ecologists know of these records made long before ecology was invented?
Whenever possible he seems to have examined the morphology of the living plants, and he fully realised the value of preserving portions of the plants in spirit for future examination instead of relying on herbarium material.
This quotation from a letter to Wight (then Superintending Surgeon of the Madras Service), with whom Griffith kept up a most interesting and friendly correspondence, from which I should like to quote largely, may give an idea of his point of view and also show how he looked forward to returning to Malacca:—
"If ever you go to the place of Podostemon endeavour to get some germinating or at least very young plants. I can fancy how an Acotyledonous plant gets a stem but how a Dicotyledonous plant loses it, and becomes as some of them do, mere discs spread
