3 



Society's appreciation of the inestimable services rendered by the 

 Bureau of International Exchanges of the Smithsonian Institu- 

 tion, which so liberally interprets the term "diffusion of know- 

 ledge" as to recognise therein the necessary but prosaic labour 

 of distributing the publications of Scientific Institutions, which 

 is done entirely free of charge. 



Mr. William Mitten, the accomplished English bryologist, and 

 fatlier-in-law of Dr. Alfred Russell Wallace, who passed away in 

 his eighty-seventh year, at Hurstpierpoint, Sussex, on July 20th, 

 1906, was elected a Corresponding Member of the Society in 

 March, 1882. His professional work, that of a pharmaceutical 

 chemist, gave him little opportunity for travel, even as far as 

 London; but this led him all the more assiduously in his leisure 

 time to cultivate at home an early acquired taste for botany, 

 until, botanicall}'- speaking, he must have come to know by heart 

 the neiglibourhood in which he was born, lived out his simple but 

 fruitful life, and in which he ended his peaceful days. Through the 

 influence of his friend and neighbour, William Borrer, and also 

 of Sir William Hooker, he was led eventually to specialise in the 

 study of mosses, hepatics and lichens; until, in this branch of 

 botan}^ he became one of the leading British authorities. His 

 published papers are very numerous; and one of them, entitled 

 " Musci Austro-Americani," by itself takes up the entire twelfth 

 volume of the botanical portion of the Journal of the Linnean 

 Society of London (1869). His more important papers on Aus- 

 tralian non-vascular cryptogams are "A List of the Musci and 

 Hepaticae collected in Victoria, Australia, by Dr. F. Mueller (in 

 Hooker's Journ. Bot. viii. 1856, pp.257-266); "Descriptions of 

 some new species of Musci from New Zealand . . . together 

 with an enumeration of the Species collected in Tasmania by 

 William Archer, Esq.," &c. (Journ. Linn. Soc. Bot. iv. 1860, 

 pp. 64-100); also the " Hepaticae," and in conjunction with the 

 Rev. C. Babbington, the " Lichenes " of Hooker's " Flora Tas- 

 manise" (I860). In addition to these, his contributions to know- 

 ledge include studies on some or other of these groups from New 

 Zealand, Fiji, and Samoa ; as well as from Japan, and Mt. 



