5'o 



NATURE 



[December i6, 1920 



I'ickcring, however, as a younger man had, in 

 order to regain his health, put himself to work as 

 a labourer on the Experimental Farm at Rotham- 

 sted, and thus acquired an interest in the applica- 

 tion of science to the problems of the cultivator. 

 He had as early as 1894 designed a series of ex- 

 periments upon the growth of fruit, and had per- 

 suaded the Uuke of Bedford to set up a trial gar- 

 den at Ridgcmount in Bedfordshire. Results soon 

 began to appear and to arouse dissent; not easily 

 did the practical fruit grower, accustomed to old 

 grass orchards, accept the doctrine of the injuri- 

 ous effect of grass upon tree growth. This sub- 

 ject occupied Pickering to the end of his days ; 

 the complexity of the problem grew with extended 

 knowledge ; but Pickering maintained his first ex- 

 planation that the grass roots excrete something 

 specifically poisonous to fruit trees. Much 

 other ground was broken — the effects of pruning, 

 methods of planting and preparing the soil for 

 planting, manuring, insecticides — there is no part 

 of the fruit grower's routine on which Pickering 

 did not inaugurate investigation. 



The conclusions published from year to year 

 and gathered together into a final volume, 

 "Science and Fruit Growing," in 1919, have been 

 the occasion of much controversy. The unsuita- 

 bility of soil and situation, and some defects in 

 management in the early years, hindered their 

 acceptance, but the \\'oburn trials will remain as 

 the most substantial contribution of the last hun- 

 dred vcars to the study of fruit-tree development, 

 one full of stimulus to new workers. His work 

 on spray fluids led Pickering back to chemistry 

 and his earliest interests basic salts; after a ten 

 years' silence papers began to reappear on such 

 questions as the basic copper salts of Bordeaux 

 mixture, on emulsions (with his strange discovery 

 of a method of solidifying paraffin), and on quadri- 

 ^•alent copper salts. 



In his horticulture, as in his chemistry, Picker- 

 ing was essentially the amateur of genius ; he 

 often seemed to be careless of, and even but 

 moderately equipped with, the knowledge that 

 was common form, academic or practical. But 

 he had a disconcerting habit of making dis- 

 coveries which contradicted that common form. 

 Either from policy or from temperament, he 

 never disguised these antagonisms ; where 

 another man might have looked round to find 

 hints and anticipations in previous experience, 

 Pickering would say roundly, "All men who have 

 hitherto expressed opinions on this point have 

 been entirely wrong," even in such a matter as 

 the way to plant a fruit tree. He loved truth, 

 and he pursued it all his Ufa like an artist, for 

 the interest it had to himself; there was also 

 something of the artist's disdain in the way he 

 presented it to the world. 



Never in robust health, an accident that de- 

 prived him of the sight of an eye probably helped 

 to keep him out of general society, nor had he any 

 of the ordinary man's amusements, .^t one time 

 he used to w^alk a great deal with his inseparable 

 companion, his wife, but he seemed to get most 

 NO. 2668, VOL. 106] 



pleasure out of the company of a few friends in 

 his Harpenden garden, and it is there, among his 

 fruit trees, or indoors at his piano, that one will re- 

 member .Spencer Pickering, handsome, imperturb- 

 able, a fine and rare presence among men. 



A. D. H. 



Wll.lJAM Akiiiik 11.\w.\ki>. 



William .\rthur Haward, who accident- 

 ally met his death on Monday, December 6, 

 whilst making some final experiments in an 

 important investigation upon gaseous com- 

 bustion under high initial pressures, upon 

 which he had been engaged during the past two 

 years as a Salters' research fellow in the Imperial 

 College of Science and Technology, was passion- 

 ately devoted to the cause of scientific research. 

 There is every reason to believe that, had his 

 career not been thus so tragically cut short, he 

 would at no distant date have achieved great 

 distinction as a scientific discoverer. Even 

 during the research which he was completing at 

 the time of his death he had, by most skilful ex- 

 perimental work, discovered a series of facts 

 which pointed to an important new fundamental 

 development in the science of combustion. Indeed, 

 the actual experiment upon which he was engaged 

 when the accident occurred was intended to test 

 a new theory which had been suggested to account 

 for some of his remarkable experimental results. 

 In due course, when the results of his research 

 are published, the importance of them to science 

 will at once be apparent. He undoubtedly laid 

 down his life in the cause of science. 



The various stages in Haward 's all too brief, 

 but very distinguished, career were as follows : 

 Entering the Royal College of Science in October, 

 191 2, he took the associateship two years later, 

 knd also his London H.Sc. degree with first-class 

 honours in chemistry. He thereupon commenced 

 a course of post-graduate study and research in 

 the department of chemical technology, under the 

 direction of Prof. W. A. Bone. It was soon ap- 

 parent that he was unusually gifted as an experi- 

 mentalist, for he made some remarkable experi- 

 ments upon certain aspects of surface combustion, 

 which have yet to be published. During two of 

 his summer vacations, in the years 191 5 and 1916, 

 he made investigations under the direction of Dr. 

 R. \'. Wheeler at the Eskmeals Home Office I-^x- 

 perimental Station upon (i) the propagation of 

 flame in mixtures of hydrogen and air, and (2) the 

 uniform movement of flame in mixtures of acetyl- 

 ene and air, the results of which were embodied 

 in two papers that were published in the joint 

 names of himself and two others (who had assisted 

 him) in the Trans. Chem. Soc. for 1916 and 1Q17. 



In June, 1916, Haward was elected to a Beit re- 

 search fellowship tenable at the Imperial College; 

 but this was relinquished some six months later 

 in order to join the chemical staff of H.M. Ex- 

 plosives Factory, Gretna, where he remained until 

 shortly after the armistice. He then obtained a 

 -Salters' research fellowship, with which, at his 



