INTRODUCTION 5 



encouragement, at any rate until the closing years of his life, 

 the field in which Williamson was so enthusiastic a pioneer 

 has since his time been generally recognised as of the first 

 importance more especially in its bearing upon the pedigree 

 of the vegetable kingdom. To-day, no branch of Botany has 

 more recruits or is more vigorously pursued in this country than 

 that of Palaeobotany, and so long as the science remains will the 

 memory of Williamson be green. 



Harry Marshall Ward belongs to a generation younger 

 than any of the foregoing. His student days coincided with the 

 renaissance of Botany in England in the seventies of the last 

 century, and coming under the influence of Huxley, Thiselton- 

 Dyer, Vines and others. Ward early revealed himself as an 

 ardent investigator. For twenty-five years he devoted his 

 remarkable energies to a series of connected researches bearing 

 broadly on the nutrition of the Fungi and allied organisms with 

 especial reference to the relationships between host and parasite. 

 The notice of his career which appears in this volume is from 

 the pen of Sir William Thiselton-Dyer. Recently printed in 

 the Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society, we are 

 indebted to the courtesy of the author and of the Council of the 

 Royal Society for permission to include it here. 



In a book like the present, the work of a large number of 

 distinct contributors, it is evident that no continuous or homo- 

 geneous treatment of the history and progress of Botany in this 

 country is possible. Judged even as a series of essays or studies 

 of representative men, The Makers of British Botany will not 

 escape criticism, so long as special reference to the work of 

 Priestley, Cavendish and Senebier finds no place in its pages, not 

 to mention such obvious omissions as Knight, Daubeny and 

 Bentham. These omissions have not been deliberate and it will 

 no doubt be possible to repair them should a second edition of 

 the work be called for. The case of Charles Darwin is different. 

 Apart from the work for which he is most famous, Darwin was 

 a great investigator of the movements of plants and of the 

 biology of flowers. As this aspect of Darwin's work has received 

 adequate treatment in the recent centenary volume published by 



