296 Obituary Notice. 



working place for earnest students. Some of the members 

 of our Society can testify to his individual courtesy, which 

 was always available, whether to obscure students of 

 theoretic botany or poor peasant farmers troubled by 

 pomological puzzles. Even the terrible siege of Paris in 

 1870-71 did not drive the Director from his post. He 

 wrote to Dr Masters in 1871, when in January over eighty 

 sliells had fallen witliin the precincts of the garden, how 

 the Pandanus, the Oyclanths, and the Dracaenas had tlieir 

 leaves torn to ribbons, while the Bromeliads were not only 

 uninjured by the explosions, but were not hurt by the frost 

 which destroyed so many nearly allied plants. And for 

 ten years after this terrible ordeal, Decaisne managed his 

 great Institution with more activity than many a younger 

 man accustomed only to the fair side of life. 



His printed works also kept pace with his administrative 

 energy. The English reader knows Sir Joseph Hooker's 

 translation of his beautifully illustrated conjunct Traite 

 generale de Botanique, 1868 ; and further proof of his syste- 

 matic work may be found in various monographs in De Can- 

 dolle's Prodromus, in the Bcvue Horticole, or in the AnncUes 

 des Sciences Naturelles, of the botanical department of which 

 he was long joint editor. Decaisne, probably incited by 

 his Herbarium work, early published Florula Sinaica (Paris, 

 1834) from plants collected by Bove, and Plantes de la 

 Ardbie Heureuse (Botta, Paris, 1841). From such studies, 

 Decaisne turned to Algology, and may be ranked as its 

 founder in the sense patent to our physiological laboratories. 

 He studied, along with his friend Thuret, Fuci originally 

 obtained in the Paris fish market, though afterwards at 

 the sea-coast. In a joint paper, published in 1844, the 

 relations involved in the fertilisation of Fucus vesicidosus, 

 bladder wrack, were first made clear; the common coraline 

 of our shores was also shown to be not a polype, but a sea- 

 weed. This morphological method of study soon influenced 

 his horticultural studies, the summation of which will be 

 found in Le Jardin Fruitier du Museum, with its splendidl}^ 

 coloured plates. There, the so-called calyx tube of the 

 Pomacecc, the eatable portion of the apple and pear, is 

 shown to be really the top of the flower stalk rendered 

 swollen and succulent. Decaisne, however, believed in the 



