94 Proceedings. 



him with pain, from the knowledge we had of the mortal 

 disease from which he was suffering, and which had just 

 begun to take an acute form during the later days of his 

 stay in Manchester. The Strassburg professor, Dr. Anton, 

 de Bary, was born on the 26th January, 1 831, in the city 

 of Frankfort, and, after holding the chairs of Botany suc- 

 cessively at Freiburg, Halle, and Strassburg, died in the 

 last-named city on the 19th January, 1888. During the 

 last 35 years of his life of 57 years he contributed a 

 succession of solid and original papers upon almost all 

 departments of vegetable physiology, but with a decided 

 bias towards investigations in the morphology and structure 

 of the cellular cryptogams. These researches led to his 

 selection by the Royal Agricultural Society of England to 

 conduct an exhaustive inquiry into the nature and origin of 

 the potato disease, which had been committing such 

 ravages in these islands ; and though this appointment led 

 at the time to a few ill-natured remarks about the inquiry 

 being entrusted to a foreigner, the results justified the 

 wisdom of the selection. De Bary's editorship of the 

 weekly Botanische Zeihing (which comes regularly to the 

 Society) showed how wide were his acquirements in all 

 departments of botanical science. The book which perhaps 

 more than any other would be selected by the speaker as 

 illustrating his judicial mind and his insight into first 

 principles is his " Comparative Anatomy of the Vegetative 

 Organs of the Phanerogams and Ferns." This work 

 discloses a vast array of isolated facts, splendidly marshalled, 

 and largely based upon his own observations and illustra- 

 tions (for he was an accomplished artist on wood) ; and yet 

 in a treatise of such erudition, disclaiming criticism, he had 

 the modesty to write, " that every word in this book has 

 had a previous author, printer, and publisher"! Such was 

 the spirit of the man \\hosc death is sincerely mourned by 

 botanists of every nationality. 



