161 



IN MEMORY OF WILLIAM WEST. 

 (1848-1914.) 



(with portrait.) 



By W. Denison Roebuck, F.L.S. 



By the death of WiUiam West, which took place at Bradford 

 on May 14th after a brief illness, this Journal has been deprived 

 of one of its most valued contributors. His first paper, " Bryo- 

 logical Notes," appeared in 1881, and from that time until 1912, 

 when he published a long and interesting paper on the Flora of 

 Shetland, "with some ecological observations," hardly a volume 

 has appeared without a contribution from his pen. As these 

 contributions — a small portion of his literary output — show, he 

 was a man with an extraordinarily wide and varied range of infor- 

 mation. He had a competent knowledge of all branches of field 

 botany, and his attainments in plant physiology and morphology 

 showed that, had he been specially interested in those branches of 

 study, he would have made his mark as an original investigator. 

 But it was as a student of the freshwater algae, and especially of 

 the Desmids, that he obtained his world-wide reputation. In 

 this department he was one of the foremost men of his time, and 

 the numerous papers and memoirs contributed to various journals 

 and to the Transactions and Proceedings of learned societies 

 testify to his unflagging energy and zeal in the pursuit of his 

 favourite study. As a systematist he has been for many years 

 recognized as an authority on the freshwater algae, and he has 

 also made valuable contributions, in numerous memoirs, to our 

 knowledge of their distribution and biological relationships. 



WilUam West was a native of Leeds, a city which has pro- 

 duced not a few naturalists of distinction, and was born February 

 22nd, 1848, on the edge of Woodhouse Moor. He studied for 

 the pharmaceutical profession, eventually quaUfying and being 

 registered on November 16th, 1870, and removing to Bradford in 

 1872, set up in business there. He was married in 1874 to 

 Hannah Wainwright, also a native of Woodhouse Moor, Leeds, 

 who died in 1904, leaving two sons and a daughter, all of whom 

 inherited their father's ability, the sons passing through Cambridge 

 University with high distinction, and both of them taking up 

 botanical work. The elder, William, died in India in 1901 (see 

 Journ. Bot. 1901, 353) ; the younger, George, is now Professor of 

 Botany at the University of Birmingham. 



In 1886 William West took up science teaching as a profession, 

 and was appointed Lecturer in Botany, and afterwards also in 

 Biology and Pharmacology at the Technical College, Bradford. 

 He was remarkably able and successful as a teacher, gaining the 

 respect and affection of his students to an extraordinary degree. 



The Yorkshire Naturalists' Union was established on its 

 present lines in 1877, and West was one of the band of able 

 naturalists who were instrumental in making it the powerful and 

 Journal of Botany. — Vol. 52. [July, 1914.] o 



