LINNEAN SOCIETY OF LONDON. 7 1 



or of answering the stream of questions with which they assailed 

 " the Professor "' whenever he was in sight. 



The end came rather suddenly, after two days of comparative 

 vigour and hope — to the last he was bright, courteous, and con- 

 siderate — he died as he had lived, a witty and charming gentleman, 

 and a Crichton of the Scientific World. 



[Edwabd Heron-Allen.] 



Hermann Grae zu Solms-Laubach, D.Ph. (Berlin), D.Sc. 

 (Cambridge), P.M.R.S., late Professor of Botany in the University 

 of Strassburg-i.-E., and a Foreign Member of this Society since 

 5th May, 1887, died in Strassburg on November 24th, 1915. By 

 descent he belonged to one of the oldest families of the German 

 nobility, which was variously connected with some of the reigning 

 bouses of the German Empire, and itself lost its sovereignty only 

 as late as 1806, when it shared the fate of " mediatisation " witli 

 many other small dynasties. He was born at Laubach in Ober- 

 hessen on December 23rd, 1842, as the son of Count Otto zu 

 Solms and Countess Luitgard, a princess of Wied by birth. He 

 received his early education at his father's house, at Schnepfenthal 

 (1854-1857j, then a famous grammar-school, and at Gicssen, 

 where he entered the University in 18G1. Although he stayed 

 there only one " semester," it Mas there where he made up his 

 mind to devote himself to the study of natural history and espe- 

 cially of botany, in which choice he was probably influenced by the 

 interest which his brother Friedrich and his uncle Keinliard took 

 in botany, the former as mycologist, the latter as bryologist. 

 From Giessen he went, in 18G2, to Berlin, where Alexander 

 Braun's name attracted so many botanical students. Here he 

 received, in 18G5, the degree of a Doctor Philosophite, his disser- 

 tation being " De Lathrsese generis positione systematica." In 

 the following year he went to Portugal, where he explored more 

 particularly the moss flora of the province of Algarve. Irom 

 this journey resulted a paper in Latin, " Tentamen bryo-geo- 

 graphise Algarvise, regni Lusitani provincife" (Halle, 1868), which 

 served him as " Habilitationsschrift,'' and thus opened to him 

 the door for an academic career. He had, during his university 

 studies, become acquainted with De Bary, then Professor of Botany 

 at Freiburg in Baden, and actually spent one " semester" with him. 

 He followed him now to Halle, where De Bary had meanwhile 

 founded a botanical laboratory and established himself as Privat 

 Dozent in the university of that town. His association with De 

 ]3ary was decisive not only for his academic career, but also for 

 much of the spirit in which his work was carried out ; for, as Jost 

 says of him, he was by his own genius essentially an artist who 

 conceived intuitively and saw in the first phice through his 

 imagination; but whatever the flights might be to \\hicli his mind 

 was led in that way, he always knew how to bridle liimselF, and 

 that he had learned in De Bary's school. A certain heaviness in 

 his style, which makes much of his writing not easy reading, 



