380 : NATURE 
[June LI; 19%, 
year he also took the B.Sc. degree in the Univer- 
sity of London. In 1883 he duly gained a first-class 
in the Natural Sciences Tripos, part 1., a success 
which was followed in 1884 by a first class in part 
ii., his subjects being botany and animal physio- 
logy. After taking his B.A. degree, there was 
some uncertainty as to which science he would 
pursue, but his inclination was to botany, his first 
scientific contribution being a paper on the glands 
of the Hypericaceee, which appeared in the Journal 
of the Linnean Society, 1884. Circumstances, 
however, led him to devote himself for a time to 
animal physiology; in 1855 he was appointed 
senior demonstrator in that subject by the late Sir 
Michael Foster, a position which he held for two 
years. Nevertheless, he was engaged, during 
that time, in botanical research, the results of 
which were published in two papers read before 
the Royal Society: the one on the proteid sub- 
stances in latex (Proc. Roy. Soc., 1886); the 
other, larger and more important, on the changes 
in the proteids in the seed which accompany 
germination (Phil. Trans., 1887), in which he 
confirmed for the Lupin the discovery by von 
Gorup-Besanez (1874) of a proteolytic enzyme in 
the seeds of the Vetch. These papers indicated 
the direction in which his future work was to lie. 
His appointment, in 1887, as professor of 
botany to the Pharmaceutical Society of Great 
Britain enabled Green to devote himself entirely to 
botany, and this he did whole-heartedly. During 
the twenty years that he held this office, his 
literary output was voluminous. The first twelve 
volumes of the Annals of Botany (1888-08) con- 
tain a number of papers by him on various points 
in the biochemistry of plants; and he contributed 
several articles to the first series (1894-8) of 
Science Progress. Perhaps the most important 
of his investigations during this period were, that 
on the germination of the seed of the castor-oil 
plant (Proc. Roy. Soc., 1890), in which he detected 
the fat-splitting enzyme (lipase), a subject to which 
he returned years afterwards (Proc. Roy. Soc., 
1905); that on the germination of the pollen-grain 
(Phil. Trans., 1894), proving the presence and 
activity of amyloclastic enzymes both in the grains 
and in the tissue of the style; and that on the 
action of light on diastase (Phil. Trans., 1897), 
where the effect of light on diastase is investigated 
and it is shown that whereas the red and the blue 
rays favour the formation of the enzyme, the 
green, the indigo, the violet, and especially the 
ultra-violet rays destroy it; and the striking sug- 
gestion is made that “vegetable structures have a 
power of absorbing radiant energy, which is not 
connected with the presence and activity of chloro- 
phyll.” 
In addition to these papers and articles, Green 
found time to write three considerable books: “A 
Manual of Botany based upon that of the late R. 
Bentley, 1895-6; “An Introduction to Vegetable 
Physiology,” 1900; and ‘The Soluble Ferments 
and Fermentation,” 1899. All three went on toa 
second edition, but the last was the most suc- 
cessful and important of them; a German transla- 
NO. 2328, VOL. 93] 
| tion of it, by Windisch, was published. They are 
characterised by the lucidity of exposition that he 
possessed in a high degree. 
Owing to failing health, Green resigned his pro- 
fessorship in 1907, and undertook the less onerous 
duties of the Hartley lectureship on vegetable 
physiology in the University of Liverpool, still, 
however, residing at Cambridge. He was com- 
missioned by the delegates of the Clarendon Press, 
Oxford, to write a continuation, published in 1909,, 
of Sachs’s “ History of Botany ” (1530-1860), to. 
bring the record up to the end of the nineteenth 
century; a difficult task which he performed with 
as much success as the circumstances permitted. 
He became so interested in work of this kind that 
he planned, and I believe completed, a history of 
botany in England, which, unfortunately, has not 
yet been published. 
A few personal details in conclusion. Green 
proceeded M.A. at Cambridge in 1888, D.Sc. in 
1894; he became a Fellow of the Linnean Society 
in 1889, and was elected to the Royal Society in 
1895. He was president of Section K (botany) at 
the Belfast meeting of the British Association in 
1902; and in the same year he was elected Fellow 
of Downing College, Cambridge. 
S: (2 Vinese 
Tue June conversazione of the Royal Society will be 
held on Tuesday next, June 16. 
Str Witi1aM OsLeR, F.R.S., Regius Professor of 
Medicine in the University of Oxford, has been elected 
a foreign Associate of the French Academy of 
Medicine. 
Pror. A. Lacroix, professor of mineralogy at the 
Paris Natural History Museum, has been elected per- 
manent secretary of the Paris Academy of Sciences 
in succession to Prof. Van Tieghem. 
Dr. R. S. Lut, professor of vertebrate palaeontology 
at Yale, will this summer conduct another western 
expedition from the Peabody Museum for the purpose 
of securing skeletons of prehistoric horses. 
THE council of the Royal Society of Arts, with the 
approval of the president, H.R.H. the Duke of Con- 
naught, has awarded the Albert medal for the current 
year to Chevalier Guglielmo Marconi, ‘‘for his ser- 
vices in the development and practical application of 
wireless telegraphy.”’ 
Tue Khedive has conferred the third class of the 
Order of the Medjidieh upon Mr. W. Lawrence Balls 
on the occasion of his retirement from the service of 
the Egyptian Government. This is, we. believe, the 
first decoration given for agricultural work since the 
foundation of the Department of Agriculture in 1910. 
Pror. H. HerGeserr, of Strassburg, has been 
appointed to the direction of the Royal Prussian Aero- 
nautical Observatory at Lindenberg, near Berlin, and 
desires that communications intended for him or the 
International Commission for Scientific Aeronautics, 
of which he is president, should be addressed to the 
ee 
