Science Ingress, 



No. 22. December, 1895. Vol. IV. 



WILLIAMSON'S RESEARCHES ON THE 

 CARBONIFEROUS FLORA. 



BY the death of Dr. William Crawford Williamson, on 

 23rd June of this year, English Science lost a fine 

 naturalist of the good old school, who had escaped the 

 narrow specialisation of the present period, and who has 

 left his mark on every department of Natural History. 

 The object of the present article, however, is not to give an 

 obituary notice of Williamson, or to attempt any account of 

 his scientific work as a whole ; that has been undertaken 

 elsewhere (by Solms-Laubach, Carruthers, Seward, Lester 

 Ward and others). What is here aimed at is to give a 

 brief statement of the chief results of his researches in the 

 special department of Fossil Botany (the Carboniferous 

 Flora) on which his scientific energies were mainly con- 

 centrated during the last twenty-five years of his life. 



Williamson's work on fossil plants dates back to the 

 very beginning of his career, for when scarcely twenty he 

 made important contributions to Lindley and Hutton's 

 Fossil Flora of Great Britain (36), 1833-37 ; at least thirty- 

 two of the plates in this classical work were drawn by him, 

 and in most of these cases the letter-press is wholly or in 

 part from his hand. In a paper on the fossil remains of 

 the Yorkshire coast (20), 1836, many vegetable remains are 

 enumerated. 



His first important original work on a palaeobotanical 



subject belongs, however, to the year 1851, when he pub- 



18 



