252 WILLIAM CRAWFORD WILLIAMSON 



The interest aroused by this investigation is shown by the 

 fact that the great German anatomist Kolliker travelled to Man- 

 chester, about the year 185 1, to see Williamson's preparations. 



As regards Williamson's work as a botanist, in which we are 

 chiefly interested in this course, his best contribution to recent 

 botany was no doubt his investigation of Volvox, published in 

 185 1 and 1852, in which he traced the development of the young 

 spheres and the mode of connection of their cells, anticipating 

 the results of much later researches. 



He was a great lover of living plants; his garden and green- 

 houses at Fallowfield, his Manchester home, were of remarkable 

 interest, and he was a keen gardener. At the British Associa- 

 tion Meeting of 1887 one of his guests said that "most of the 

 distinguished botanists of Europe and America were in the 

 garden, and not one but who had seen something growing he 

 never saw before^" Insectivorous plants and the rarer vascular 

 cryptogams were specially well represented. It was from his 

 private garden that his classes were supplied with specimens. 



As we have seen, fossil plants engaged Williamson's atten- 

 tion in his earliest years, when as a mere boy he contributed to 

 Lindley and Hutton's Fossil Flora. 



His first important independent work in this field was his 

 paper "On the Structure and Affinities of the Plants hitherto 

 known as Sternbergiae " (185 1), in which he proved, for the first 

 time, that these curious fossils, resembling a rouleau of coins, 

 were casts of the discoid pith of Dadoxylon, or, as we should 

 now say, of Cordaiteae the first step in the reconstruction of 

 this early gymnospermous family. This investigation, to which 

 he appears to have been led almost accidentally, through some 

 good specimens coming into his hands, brought him back, as he 

 says, to his old subject of fossil botany. It was long, however, 

 before he got fairly started on his great course of investigations 

 on Carboniferous plants. 



In the meantime he had returned to the Yorkshire Oolitic 

 plants and, about 1847, published a paper in the Proceedings 

 of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society, "On the Scaly Vegetable 

 Heads or collars from Runswick Bay, supposed to belong to the 



^ Reminiscences, p. 190. 



