i84 WILLIAM GRIFFITH 



I may quote from a letter addressed to Griffith by von 

 Martius of Munich, since it couples his own opinion and that of 

 Robert Brown. " He (Brown) agrees with me in appreciating 

 your spirited and enlightened investigations, and I now more 

 than ever look forward to you as his successor as the standard 

 English botanist." 



Only an outline of the nature of Griffith's scientific work 

 with some details on selected subjects can be attempted here. 

 His published works in the Transactions of the Linnean 

 Society and elsewhere, important as they are, represent only 

 a small fraction of his observations. But the wisdom and 

 liberality of the East India Company has put us in possession 

 of his unpublished notes and drawings (bequeathed with his 

 collections to the Company) in the posthumously published 

 volumes of Notulae ad plantas Asiaticas with the accompanying 

 sets of plates. Though his papers were not ready or intended 

 for publication in this form and suffer from having had to be 

 arranged by another hand, they afford, together with his pub- 

 lished work, a particularly good picture of how the problems of 

 morphology and classification presented themselves to a keen 

 investigator at this time. 



Of his purely systematic work I shall not speak at length. 

 In addition to smaller papers the most important contribution 

 was his illustrated monograph on the Palms of British East 

 India. In the NoUilae numerous species are described and 

 figured nearly always with reference to the morphology and 

 physiology of the parts concerned. It is his investigations made 

 with direct reference to morphology and reproduction that claim 

 our attention most. In dealing with them it is convenient to 

 treat of the main questions to which he directed his attention 

 rather than of the separate papers. I shall call attention 

 first to his work on the flower and on fertilisation in a number 

 of plants, then to his observations on Cycas, and lastly to his 

 work on the Cryptogams. 



Interest in the structure of the ovule and the nature of 

 fertilisation was widespread at the time Griffith worked. A 

 few years previously Robert Brown had laid the foundations of 

 the scientific study of the ovule and the behaviour of the pollen 



