288 OBITUARY 



to try and rear it by hand. To our astonishment how- 

 ever, the sun-birds found it half an hour later, and fed It 

 through the wires for a week until it could fly, when we 

 released it. They continued to feed it on adjacent trees 

 for a few days longer until it flitted. I might add by the 

 way that this is the first occasion that I have seen more 

 than a pair of these cuckoos together. 



01) Hilary. 

 William Tyson. 



This pioneer of biological science in South Africa 

 passed away at Grahamstown on April 14th, 1920, in his 

 seventy-first year. He belonged to that past generation 

 of botanists which laid the foundation of our present 

 knowledge on plant distribution in South Africa. Dur- 

 ing a period of nearly 45 years in this country, Mr. 

 Tyson made extensive collections of the native flora. His 

 material from East Griqualand, Pondoland and Murrays- 

 burg is specially important, containing many species not 

 previously known. The collections were distributed to 

 various public and private institutions, either directly 

 or through the gentlemen who helped him in the identifi- 

 cations of his plants, the late Drs. H. Bolus and P. 

 MacOwan. The most complete set of Tyson's plants is 

 that in the Cape Government Herbarium^ and there are 

 good sets also in the Bolus Herbarium, in the Albany 

 Museum, Grahamstown, and at Kew. In preparing the 

 specimens, he was scrupulously careful and neat, and, in 

 the opinion of a competent authority, no collector in 

 South Africa has exceeded Tyson, and few have equalled 

 him in this respect. 



The last nine years of his life were spent at Pt. Alfred 

 in enforced seclusion, for physical infirmity entirely pre- 



