JAMES EUSTACE BAGNALL 355 



In 1864 Bagnall was lent by a friend a small compound micro- 

 scope ; he then began to mount objects, his first attempt being a 

 petal of Qeranium Rohertianum. Wishing to ascertain its name, 

 he consulted Bentham's Handbook and identified it. From this 

 time he became an enthusiastic student of botany ; in the same year 

 he joined the Naturalists' Union, a club just started in the town, but 

 soon left it for the Birmingham Natural History Society, which had 

 not long begun its career. When this Society was later divided into 

 sections, the botanical section undertook the study of the ficn'a of a 

 district comprising ten miles round the town. Of this, by a happy 

 accident, the part including the gem of the district, Sutton Park 

 (then a wild almost untrodden area of heath, wood, and moorland), 

 fell to Bagnall's lot. A list of the plants was published in the 

 Society's Transactions for 1869-70. 



Afterwards, when the Midland liailway Comjjany, by a deplorable 

 neglect on the part of the authorities, obtained powers to run a rail- 

 way through the Park, he began a more thorough study of its fiora, 

 and of the changes induced by the making of the railway, the result 

 of which was seen in the Notes on Sutton I^ark and its Flora, 

 printed in 1877. Previously to this, in 1874, he had published his 

 first contribution to the Journal of Botani/, " The Moss-fiora of 

 Warwickshhe," and his interest in mosses continued during the whole 

 of his career : he added Grimmia crinita and Dicranum undulatum 

 to the British flora, and used to boast that his moss-herbarium contained 

 nearly every known British species, many of them of course obtained 

 by exchange with collectors in other districts. In 1886. at which 

 time he was Vice-President of the Birmingham Natural History and 

 Microscopical Society — he had in the previous year been elected an 

 Associate of the Linnean Society — he published a Handbook of 

 Mosses, and in 1903 (Journ. Bot. 366, 388) a list of the Mosses and 

 Hepatics of Worcestershire, which is reprinted with additions in 

 The Botany of Worcestershire by Messrs. Amphlett and liea (1909). 



During the years from 1876 to 1888, Bagnall devoted the whole 

 of liis leisure time to the compilation of his chief work. The Flora of 

 Warwickshire, which after having appeared serially, in incomplete 

 form, in the llidland Naturalist was published in 1891 by Messrs. 

 Cornish Brothers, Birmingham. Only five hundred copies of this 

 book were printed, and nearly the whole of these were subscribed for 

 before publication, a fact which says much for the esteem in which 

 Bagnall was justly held by the botanists of the whole country. For 

 this work he received the Darwin Medal of the Midland Union of 

 Natural History Societies. One usually calls such a book a " com- 

 pilation," but in his case this is scarcely true : the plants of parts of 

 Warwickshire had, indeed, been studied by previous botanists- — Jiay, 

 Withering, Purton, Perry, etc. — but Bagnall's was not a mind that 

 was satisfied with half-measures. He determined to visit every part 

 of the county himself, and personally investigate its fiora ; and when 

 one knows how remote some of the districts are from Birmingham, 

 and how dirticult and slow they were then to reach, the magnitude of the 

 task is evident. A railway-ride of three or four hours would often be 

 followed by a long walk of twelve or twenty miles, and as the pace was 



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