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THE JOURNAL OF BOTANY 



successful instrument of local scientific research which it has 

 been ever since. He became Secretary of the Botanical Section 

 in succession to Dr. H. Franklin Parsons, but his professional 

 duties prevented his taking much active part in its work after 

 these first few years. He was elected President for 1899, a signi- 

 ficant mark of the appreciation of the esteem in which he was 

 held by his fellow Yorkshiremen. He became a Fellow of the 

 Linnean Society on March 17th, 1887; he was also a member and 

 frequent attender at the meetings of the British Association, and 

 Secretary of its Botanical Section in 1900 at Bradford. 



In the earlier years (1878-1887) of West's scientific work he 

 was an all-round botanist with a wide and accurate knowledge of 

 all the groups both of flowering and flowerless plants, being gifted 

 with a powerful and retentive memory and remarkable powers of 

 observation. He published numerous notes about this time, 

 dealing wath such subjects as Mosses (1878), the Autumn Flora 

 of Whernside (1879), a February stroll near Baildon (1881), the 

 principal plants of Malham (1883), the plants of the Bradford 

 district (1886), Buckinghamshire Lichens (1880), the Eoses of 

 Towton Battlefield (1879), &c. He contributed a considerable 

 amount of material to Lees's Flora of West Yorkshire (1888), after 

 which he began to concentrate his energies on the freshwater 

 algae, the Desmicliacece especially. His son George was now 

 co-operating in these studies, and the practical self-training of 

 the father and the parental and academic training of the son, 

 based upon a combination of practical field-work and an apprecia- 

 tion of specific and varietal differentiation with a capacity for 

 broad and sound generalization, began to yield fruit in no small 

 degree. Theirs was no mere local study, the whole world was 

 now their sphere of investigation, and the command of the com- 

 plete literature of their subject and of innumerable gatherings 

 from almost all parts of the globe, with the willing co-operation 

 of European and American workers, enabled the two Wests to 

 establish themselves among the foremost students of their subject. 



William West's remarkable knowledge of cryptogamic plants 

 of all kinds and of their conditions of growth made him a unique 

 personality in Britain, probably in Europe. He was an ecologist 

 long before the term itself was coined, always fully conscious of 

 the importance of the common and dominant forms. The algo- 

 logical investigations which were now his main line of research 

 were most systematically and diligently carried on. Holidays 

 were utilized to the full for visiting all parts of the British Islands, 

 especially the outlying montane regions of Scotland and Ireland, 

 North Wales, and the English Lakes. The work began near 

 home, and their native county of Yoi'k was worked, a list published 

 for each of its Eidings, and finally in 1900-1901 a complete alga- 

 flora of the county. Then came papers dealing with North Wales 

 (1890), the English Lake district (1892), the West of Ireland 

 (1892), Scotland (1893), the South of England (1897), the North 

 of Ireland (1902), the Orkneys and Shetlands (1905), and the 

 Clare Island Survey (1912), many of which were published in this 



