197 



Solent, when there was a considerable sea on, and where the grass 



grew 



, . ,._. _ x . . = -. — big waves came it 



seemed to withstand their action very much better than where the 

 mud existed without grass." 



XXXIV.-MISCELLANEOUS NOTES. 



G. D. Haviland.— The Court of Probate has recently presumed 

 the death of Dr. George Darby Haviland who had been missine 

 since 1901. 8 



Dr. Haviland has been a contributor to the Kew Herbarium 

 since 1891. All his collections were made in Northern Borneo, 

 and chiefly in Sarawak, where he acted till 1893 as medical officer 

 to the Sarawak Government, and afterwards as curator of the 

 Government Museum at Kuching. He returned to England in 

 1895, and worked for some time in the Herbarium at Kew on a 

 revision of the Naucleae, which was published in the Journal of 

 the Linnean Society in 1897 (Bot. vol. xxxiii., pp. 1-94, tab. 1-4), and 

 on a monograph of the genus Acrantlvra. The latter remained, 

 however, unfinished. Subsequently he went to South Africa for 

 the purpose of studying the habits of the Termites a paper on 



^' h ! C onl rom his P en a PP e ared in the Journal of the Linnean Society 

 in 1897 (Zool. vol. xxvi., No. 169) under the title "Observations 

 on Termites with descriptions of new species." He was so 

 successful in this field that his mode of classification has, we 

 understand, been adopted by the workers on the subject, while 

 his collections of Termites are regarded as the finest ever brought 

 to Europe. In 1901 he was staying with relations at Estcourt, 

 Natal. One day he went out on his bicycle apparently for a trip 

 into the hilly country around. He never returned, nor was he 

 heard of again. His bicycle, however, was found a year after- 

 wards near the ascent. 



The collections presented to Kew by Dr. Haviland comprise 

 about 2,500 specimens, prepared with considerable care and often 

 under difficult conditions. When his duties as curator of the 

 Kuching Museum claimed most of his time he employed, for 

 collecting, Dyaks whom he had trained, and he always made it a 

 point to mention their names on the labels. Later on his name 

 was, on the labels, coupled with that of Dr. Charles Hose, nephew 

 of the Bishop of Singapore and Sarawak. The first set of speci- 

 mens was not numbered, but provided instead with a cumbrous 

 system of ciphers, the first letter standing for the year of 

 collecting (a for 1888, b for 1889, &c), the second for the half- 

 month (a for Jan. 1-15, b for Jan. 16-31, &c), the third for the 

 day of the half -month (the letters after /• being used when the day 

 was not quite certain), the fourth for the number of the plant 

 collected on the day corresponding to the preceding letters. 

 Where a fifth letter occurs it indicates that he believed the plant 

 to be identical with one collected previously and denoted by the 

 first four letters. 



The collections proved very rich in novelties, a certain number 

 of which have been described in the Kew Bulletin and in other 

 publications. The most important contribution was, however, a 



