THEIR STUDY IN BRITAIN. 5
occupation he was a hard-working banker, and for many years,
he acted as treasurer to the Linnean Society. His herbarium,
collected in many parts of England and Wales, is now in
the British Museum. It contains the earliest specimens of
Mycetozoa from the county of Essex that we possess. He
died at the age of 83 of cholera, caught while visiting a Refuge
for destitute people which he and his brothers had founded.
His name is commemorated among plants in the Wood-rush,
Luzula Forsteri.
James Sowerby, whose beautiful illustrations of flowering
plants in Smith's English Botany are well known, published
between 1797 and 1809 Figures of English Fungi and Mushrooms,
wherein some charming portraits of Mycetozoa appear.
Very good illustrations of nineteen species of Mycetozoa are
also to be seen in R. K. Greville's Scottish Cryptogamic Flora,
published between 1823 and 1829, a work which was never
completed for lack of funds. Of Greville, the Rev. Miles Berkeley
wrote a few years later:—"Almost the whole credit of any
knowledge of fungi which exists at present in this country is
due to the exertions of Dr. Greville, whose admirable publica-
tions have at least induced a better mode of study, if they
have not as yet raised so many students as might have been
expected from his labours, That his great work, containing
certainly the most beautiful plates ever published, and which
has been duly appreciated by all the highest authorities, should
not have met with a support sufficient to ensure its continuance,
is too lamentable a proof that such an indifference to the study
of fungi does exist."
It is to Berkeley, whose zeal did much to remove that in-
difference to mycology, that we owe the first masterly and com-
prehensive book on fungi that appeared in this country. Born
at Oundle, in Northamptonshire, he was educated at Rugby,
and Christ's College, Cambridge, where he took holy orders.
He obtained a curacy at Margate and there, besides devoting
himself conscientiously to professional duties, spent his leisure
in natural history pursuits. Although he seems to have had
no training in science beyond what he gained by his own studies,
his knowledge of fungi won so high a repute that, in 1833, he
was asked by Sir William Hooker to write the volume on that
subject for Smith's English Flora, of the Cryptogamic section