LINNEAN SOCIETY OF LOIn^DOK. 45 



After his retirement lie spent liis time iu writing, especially his 

 Diar}^ published after his death by his nephew, the Kev. Canon 

 E. R. iS'evill, M.A., Vicar of the Cathedral at Dunedin, in VJ22. 

 He died in the last week of October, 1921, and was buried on the 

 1st November. 



The writer gratefully acknowledges the help in the above 

 account of a singularly able and resourceful ecclesiastic, derived 

 from Canon Nevill previously mentioned. [B, D. J.] 



William Henry Peaesox, of Withington, near Manchester, was 

 born in 1850, and was for nearly fifty years a yarn agent on the 

 Manchester 1-ioyal Exchange, having the reputation of a sound 

 man of business, but delighting in his hobby of studying He|)atica?, 

 in which he became an expert of wide fame. Hr. Carrington 

 (1827-93) directed his attention to this group of plants and with 

 him he issued in 1878-90, a set of specimens, and in 1902, his 

 sumptuous work on British Hepaticse saw the h'ght. Continuing his 

 researches, he extended his observations to exotic species, working 

 u]), amongst other collections, those gathered by Miss Eleonora 

 Armitage in the West Indies, and those by Prof. K. II. Compton in 

 1914 in New Caledonia and the Isle of Pines. The latter was 

 published in our Jouriuil (Botany), vol. xlvi. (1922), pp. 13-44, 

 plates 2-4. 



He received the Hon M.Sc. from the University of Manchester, 

 for whose department of botiiny he had strenuously laboured ; his 

 election as an Associate of the Liiniean Society dated from the 

 17th of January, 1907 ; he died on Thursday, 19th of April, 1923, 

 and was buried in the Manchester Southern Cemetery. [B. D. J.] 



Ekederic Newton Williams was born at Brentford, Middlesex, 

 on the 19th March, 1862. After his schooldays he studied 

 medicine at University College and St. Thomas's Hospital, and 

 after qualifying in 1883-1885, he settled in his native town as a 

 medical practitioner. His nearness to Ivew induced him to carry 

 on his researches in systematic botany, and the writer's earliest 

 i-emembiance of our late Fellow, was the sight of him with his 

 head buried in a cabinet at Kew, containing herbai-ium specimens 

 of Dianthns, a genus to which he was always partial. His early 

 studies resulted in his little work ' Enumeratio speciennn variefa- 

 tumque generis DitoitJms' [Brentse Vadum, 1885] ; followed in 

 1889 by Ills ' Notes on the Pinks of AVestern PiUrope,' London ; 

 and then by his ambitious pa])er in the Journal of this Society, 

 " A Monograph of the genus Dianthns,^'' issued in 1893. Two years 

 later he printed his 'Provisional and tentative List of the Orders 

 and Eamilies of British Flowering Plants,' Brentford; a second 

 edition appearing in 1898. That year he issued "A Revision of the 

 genus Arcnaria" in our Journal, and with the pecuniary help of 

 the Royal Society, he produced 10 parts of his ' Prodromus Florae 

 Britannica?,' Brentford, 1901-12. He then transferred his acti- 

 vities to a Swiss publication, the 'Bulletin de I'llerbier Boissier,' 



