his living, being unable to comply with the Act of Uniformity. Twenty years later, as a man of seventy-five, he was convicted of a breach of the Five Mile Act, and imprisoned for six months in Coventry Gaol. But though by this time his sight had failed, his spirit was indomitable. Whilst in prison, he dictated a sermon every week to an amanuensis, who read it to several shorthand writers, each of whom undertook a number of copies; it was then distributed to various secret religious meetings, at which it was read. Nehemiah Grew was Obadiah's only son, and it is a curious fact that the year 1682, which witnessed the father's imprisonment, was the year in which the son published his magnum opus, The Anatomy of Plants, prefaced by an Epistle Dedicatory to "His most sacred Majesty Charles II." So far as one can gather, Nehemiah Grew's career seems to have been singularly unaffected by the political crises that took place around him. The deliberate style of his writing certainly suggests a studious and unruffled life. He was an undergraduate at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, and afterwards took his doctor's degree in medicine at Leyden, at the age of thirty. He seems to have been successful in his profession, and we learn from the sermon[1] preached at his funeral that he died suddenly, whilst still actively engaged in his practice. In the words of the sermon, "It was his Honour and Happiness, to be Serviceable to the last Moments of Life."
Before turning to Grew's botanical work, it may be worth while to refer very briefly to his writings on other subjects, showing as they do the remarkable versatility of his mind. He produced a series of chemical papers, and also pamphlets on the method of making sea-water fresh, and on the nature of the salts present in the Epsom wells. In 1681 appeared his Musæum Regalis Societatis, a catalogue raisonné of the objects in the Museum of the Royal Society, with which were bound up some contributions to animal anatomy. The Catalogue is a bulky volume, and it is hard to forbear a smile on reading that Grew dedicated it to one Colwall, the founder of the Museum, in order
