1922-23.] BOTANICAL SOCIETY OF EDINBURGH 189 



OBITUARY NOTICES. 

 William Evans, 1851-1922. 



"He was perhaps the most competent Scottish field 

 naturalist of his day, a man whose sympathies ranged over 

 the whole field of wild life and whose knowledge was equally 

 precise concerning the animals and the plants of the country- 

 side from the lowest to the highest orders." 



The words are those of one who knew him well, and had it 

 not been that the appreciation of William Evans from the pen 

 of Dr. Ritchie turns mainly and naturally on the zoological 

 side, I should have transcribed it entire and untouched to 

 these pages of Botanical Transactions.^ 



Yet in Botany, as in Zoology, William Evans was a man of 

 wide interests, not confining himself to any single group of 

 plants, but making himself thoroughly acquainted with all, 

 possessing, indeed, an intimate knowledge of the lower as 

 well as of the higher forms. 



The love of plants had an opportunity to develop early, 

 for it was in the atmosphere of the garden that William Evans 

 spent his youngest days. His father, William Wilson Evans, 

 was Curator of the Caledonian Horticultural Society's Ex- 

 perimental Garden in Inverleith Row, Edinburgh, which was 

 later absorbed in the Royal Botanic Garden, and there 

 William Evans, the second youngest of a family of six, was 

 born on 9th May 1851. His early years in the old Experi- 

 mental Garden were followed by boyhood spent in an environ- 

 ment close to Nature. With his father at Tynefield Farm, 

 near East Linton, whither he had removed in 1857, and later 

 with his uncle at Buckstone Farm, near Mortonhall, the boy 

 came into touch with those influences which seem to have 

 determined the nature and character of his life-work. Before 

 he was ten years of age, he had expressed his interest in bird 

 life in a series of miniature models of birds cut with his pen- 

 knife in wood and painted in colours with his own brush. 

 As a boy, this making of models was one of his favourite 

 occupations. The subjects of his study varied, but in every 

 case there is expressed at this early age that intense devotion 



^ " WilKam Evans, F.R.S.E.," by James Ritchie. The Scottish 

 Naturalist, 1922, pp. 169-173. 



