24 SCIENTIFIC WOEK, 1860-1865 



The monograph on Welwitschia, patiently working out it 

 morphology, development, and histology, still holds its place 

 though recently many papers on it have been written unde 

 the direction of the late Dr. Pearson * of the Cape, and ne^ ' 

 light has been thrown on it by subsequent botanica 

 generalisations. 



The determination of this highly anomalous plant was i 

 matter of great labour and prolonged microscopical examina 

 tion directed by unrivalled botanical knowledge. ' I expecl 

 it is going to be your Barnacles,' wrote Darwin with a jesting 

 glance at his own long drawn labours with the microscope or 

 that genus ; and Hooker himself regarded this as his greates 

 triumph of the kind. 



* I brought my remarkable plant before Linn. Soc. las 

 Thursday (he tells Darwin, January 19, 1862) with some effect- 

 it was thought quite as curious as I represented.' 



And the following day he writes tojHuxley : 



Then this blessed Angola plant has proved even more 

 wonderful than I expected — figurez vous a Dicot. embryo, ex- 

 panding like a dream into a huge broad woody brown disc 8 

 years old and of texture and surface like an overdone loaf, 

 5 feet diam. by 1| high above the ground, and never growing 

 higher, and whose two cotyledons become the two and only 

 two leaves the plant ever has, and these each a good fathom 

 long. From the edges of this disc, above the two leaves, 

 rise branched annual panicles, bearing cones something 

 like Pine cones, which contain either all female flowers, or all 

 hermaphrodite flowers ; the hermaph. flowers consist of one 

 naked ovule absolutely the same as of Ephedra, in the organic 

 axis of the flower, surrounded by six stamens and a four- 

 leaved perigone. The ¥ flower is quite different ! Lastly, 



1 H. Harold W. Pearson (1870-1916). He was educated privately, and after 

 holding a teaching post at Eastbourne, he entered Cambridge in 1893 ; was 

 Foundation Scholar of Christ's College in 1896, Darwin Prizeman and Frank 

 Smart Student of Botany at Gonville and Caius College 1898. Visited Ceylon 

 as Wort's Travelling Scholar 1897-8, and gained the Walsingham Gold Medal 

 in 1899. B.A. 1896; M.A. 1900, and Sc.D. 1907. Assistant for India, Royal 

 Gardens, Kew, 1899-1901. Assistant to the Director 1901-3. Appointed 

 Harry Bolus Professor of Botany, S. African College, 1903, he travelled a good 

 deal; especially in Namaqua Land; and contributed various botanical and geo- 

 graphical papers. Through his ceaseless exertions an unrivalled Botanical 

 Garden has been formed at the Cape. F.R.S. 1916. 



