IN MEMORY OP WILLIAM WEST 163 



Journal. European countries were left to Continental workers, 

 except for papers dealing with Denmark (1891) and Portugal 

 (1892). But material was sent to them from many parts of the 

 world, and this formed the basis of memoirs published for the 

 American States of Maine (1888, 1891) and Massachusetts (1889), 

 and for the West Indies (1894, 1899). For the Old World were 

 published papers on Singapore (1897), Koh Chang (1901), Ceylon 

 (1902), Burma and other parts of India (1907), and Kinabalu and 

 North Borneo (1914) ; meanwhile another able Leeds algologist, 

 Mr. W. Barwell Turner, had monographed the Desmids of India. 

 The Wests dealt with Madagascar in 1895, Central Africa in 1896, 

 and Welwitsch's African collections in 1897, and (in 1911) the 

 freshwater algae collected by the Shackleton Antarctic Expedition. 



Besides these more serious undertakings, numerous notes were 

 published in various journals, as well as articles of more general 

 scope and import, including memoirs on the Conjugation of the 

 Zygnemaceae (1891), and Observations on the Conjugatse (1898). 



Speaking generally, the earlier papers (to 1893 or so) appeared 

 as by William West alone, the later ones by himself and his son 

 jointly ; but the co-operation in the work had extended over the 

 whole series, and of later years the algological work fell to the 

 son, while the father devoted time to the study of the ecology of 

 the bryophytes and lichens. 



Finally came the pubHcation of their culminating work by the 

 Eay Society — the Monograjyh of the British DesmidiacecB ; of this 

 four volumes have appeared (1904, 1905, 1908, 1911), while two 

 remain to be completed by the surviving author. 



These algological investigations did not, however, exhaust the 

 potentialities of the subject, and led up to another line of in- 

 vestigation, that of the phytoplankton of lakes and rivers. In 

 this the two Wests were the pioneer British workers, and they 

 took up the task in characteristically full and systematic fashion. 

 Aided by grants from the Government Grant Fund and from the 

 Eoyal Irish Academy, the detailed field work was begun about 

 1900, and Western and Southern Scotland, the lakes of England 

 and iSforth Wales, those of Western and South-western Ireland, 

 as well as Lough Neagh, Malham Tarn, and the rivers Ouse, 

 Lochay, and Bann, were visited during the vacation seasons 

 of several years. The results of these plankton researches 

 proved to be of high importance, and were summarized in the 

 Proceedings of the Boyal Society for 1909. From a bio- 

 logical point of view the British Lakes are of great interest, 

 the researches of the two Wests showing that the lake- 

 plankton of extreme Western Europe, and particularly of the 

 British Islands, differs completely from that of Central Europe, 

 being characterized by the presence and dominance of Desmids. 

 Their observations showed that Desmid -plankton occurred only 

 in rich Desmid-areas, and that these rich areas were directly 

 correlated with montane areas, with heavy and persistent rainfall, 

 and, most important of all, with the presence of the oldest rocks, 

 Archaean and the older palaeozoic rock-formations ; and their 



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