XXX 



botany, the subject with which his name is now most intimately 

 associated, as it occupied all the latter part of his career as an 

 investigator. His interest in such matters goes back, as has been 

 mentioned above, to the very beginning of his scientific life. In 

 addition to his work for Lindley and Hutton, a paper of his on the 

 origin of coal was read before the British Association as early as 

 1842. His first original contribution to fossil botany dates from the 

 year 1851, when he published a paper " On the Structure and 

 Affinities of the Plants hitherto known as Sternbergia?," in which he 

 demonstrated their true nature as casts of the pith-cavity of Grymno- 

 spermous trees. A few years later, in 1854-5, he published papers 

 on what was then called Zamia gigas, an extraordinary oolitic fossil, 

 which Williamson believed to have Cycadean affinities, a view which 

 has since been so far confirmed that the fossil is now regarded as 

 representing the fructification of one the Bennettiteas, an allied, 

 though very different family. Williamson's full memoir on the 

 subject was written soon after 1855, but, owing to a succession of 

 misfortunes, its appearance was long delayed, and it only saw the 

 light in the ' Linnean Society's Transactions ' for 1868, when it was 

 published simultaneously with Mr. Carruthers' well-known paper on 

 fossil Cycadean stems. The latter author founded a new genus for 

 Zamia gigas under the name of Williamsonia. 



Williamson's really characteristic work in fossil botany consisted 

 in the investigation of the histological structure of carboniferous 

 plants. The first beginning was made with the paper on Sternbergia, 

 but it was not till long afterwards that the long series of publications 

 began, which have done more than the works of any other writer to 

 make us acquainted with the organisation of Paleozoic plants. It 

 was early in the fifties that Williamson made his first sections, but 

 not till 1868 that, in consequence of a correspondence with the 

 French palasobotanisfc, Grand'Eury, he published the result of his 

 investigations in the paper u On the Structure of the Woody Zone 

 of an undescribed Form of Calamite," ' Manchester Literary and 

 Philosophical Society's Proceedings,' Ser. 3, vol. 4. From that 

 period onwards, his whole time available for original research was 

 devoted to the Carboniferous Flora, and a magnificent series of 

 memoirs was the result, which will always rank among the classics 

 of fossil botany. The Royal Society alone published in the ' Philo- 

 sophical Transactions ' nineteen memoirs from his hand, their dates 

 ranging from 1871 to 1893, and, besides these, many valuable papers 

 appeared elsewhere, notably the memoir on Stigmaria ficoides, pub- 

 lished in 1886, by the Palseontographical Society. It is impossible 

 here to attempt anything like a summary of this great work, which 

 threw light on every department of Palaeozoic botany.* 

 * For fuller information see Williamson's ' Reminiscences/ especially chap. 13 ; 



