G1-01JL 



PREFACE 



MY friend and colleague, Mr. Giinther, has asked me to 

 write a few words by way of Preface to this volume. I am 

 not sure that any words at all are needed. If any are they 

 should certainly be few. There are of course some still living 

 in the University and in the country, who even yet remember 

 Dr. Daubeny at work in his Lecture Room and in the 

 Laboratory which bears his name, but they are a small and 

 rapidly diminishing band. While, however, his personal 

 memory must more and more fade from among us, and by- 

 and-by disappear altogether, it may fairly be claimed for him, 

 as for many greater and even more than for some greater 

 men, that the result of his effort is still growing and becomes 

 more and more apparent. 



Daubeny was without doubt a pioneer, and a pioneer of 

 a great army advancing in a noble cause. The study of 

 Natural Science in Oxford in the first half of the last century 

 lay for the most part, like the Botanic Garden itself, outside 

 the wall and circle of the Academic republic, and its pro- 

 fessors were liable to be regarded as eccentric in more senses 

 than one. About Daubeny's own personality, moreover, 

 there would seem to have been always a little, or more than 

 a little, to smile at, and stories are still remembered of his 

 amiable foibles and the humorous aspect of his lectures 

 and experiments, which were not always apparently taken as 

 seriously as they were meant to be. But he had the ad- 

 vantage of being a Winchester and Oxford man, trained in 

 the old humanities, a scholar and a gentleman, uniting simple 

 piety with liberal views, and, like Acland a little later, he 

 was able to conciliate opposition and gradually to introduce 



