LINNEAN SOCIETY OF LONDON. 4I 



He was the elder son of Sir Walter Nevill, of Highbury jN^ew 

 Park, London, born in 1889, and educated at St. Andrew's School, 

 Eastbourne, and afterwards at Uppingliam. He became a member 

 of his father's firm on the Slock Exchange, and was a member 

 of the Honourable Artillery Company when the war broke out. 

 He volunteered for foreign service, and was sent to Egypt with 

 his battery in 1915, and thence transferred to Aden. He was 

 given a commission as Second Lieutenant in the Koyal Eield 

 Artillery in 1916, and serving in France for eighteen mouths of 

 continuous service he met liis death as stated above, a severe loss 

 to his battery as testified to by brother officers. In 1918 Mr. 

 Nevill married Miss Eunice May Le Bas. He became a Fellow of 

 this Society ou the 17th November, 1910. [B. D. J.] 



Ethel Saegant. — One of our most gifted and distinguished 

 Fellows — the first woman to sit upon the Council — died on 

 January 16th, 1918, at Sidmouth. 



She was born at 45 Regent's Park Eoad, London, on the 28th 

 October, 1863, the third daughter of Henry Sargant of Lincoln's 

 Inn, having Mr. Edmund Eeale Sargant (Director of Education for 

 the Transvaal and Orange fiiver Colony during the Boer War, and 

 after\^ards Education Adviser to the High Commissioner of South 

 Africa for several years). Sir Charles Henry (Mr. Justice) Sargant, 

 and Mr. AV^alter Lee Sargant, Head Master of Oakham School, as 

 brothers. She was educated at the North London Collegiate 

 School for Girls under Miss Buss, and at Girton College, Cam- 

 bridge, which she entered in October 1881, and left in June 1885, 

 having taken both parts of the Natural Sciences Tripos. 



Ethel Sargant belonged to that class of amateurs io which 

 Science owes so much — amateur, not in the sense of dilettante, 

 but in the sense of one \\hose love of the work is so great that 

 they are willing to pay to the full tlie toll of labour extracted 

 from those who aspire to extend the boundaries of knowledge. 



Her name will always be associated with the well-supported 

 and well-reasoned theory of tlie Origin of IMonocotyledons which 

 she put forward in 1903. This contribution turned tlie scale in 

 favour of the relative antiquity of Dicotyledons, which has been 

 largely assumed by the majority of writers since that time. Her 

 theory was based on her own extensive investigations of the 

 anatomical structure of very young Mouocotyledonous seedlings 

 — a hitherto almost untouched field — which, in spite of the great 

 variability met w itli, pointed to the existence of a common ground 

 plan, which ground ])lan was not unlike that seen in the 

 Eanunculaceae among Dicotyledons. Further, a comparison of 

 the habit of Monocotyledons with that of certain Dicotyledons 

 led to the view that Monocotyledons were derived from a 

 dicotyledonous condition by fusion of the two members correlated 

 with the acquisition of a geophilous habit. 



This conclusion Miss Sargant submitted to a close analysis of the 

 salient features of Monocotyledons and Dicotyledons in a brilliant 

 contribution entitled " A Reconstruction of a Race of Primitive 



