404 
NATURE 
[MarcH 24, 1923 

of his work in and for horticulture. For nearly sixty 
years he was intimately connected with the Royal 
Horticultural Society. His grandfather and father had 
both taken a keen interest in gardening at Charing 
and Ashford, and the curate of Charing, the Rey. 
J. Dix, for some time chairman of the Royal Horti- 
cultural Society’s Floral Committee, was an intimate 
friend of his youth. His love of Nature and gardening 
was still further fostered by his education under Prof. 
Pritchard, and by his vicar at Croydon, Canon Hodgson, 
so that when he went to Shirley he was well 
equipped to follow his bent in the large garden of the 
vicarage. He became a member of the Royal Horti- 
cultural Society’s Floral Committee about 1880, and 
at the great reconstruction of the Society in 1888 he 
was appointed honorary secretary. He filled the post 
of secretary until 1920, when he retired and was elected 
to the council. 
In 1888 the Society was in very low water; its 
liabilities were great, its finances low ; it had less a 
horticultural than a social policy ; it seemed doomed 
to early wreck, after weathering the storms of eighty- 
four years. With its new secretary, Sir Trevor 
Lawrence, Sir Daniel Morris, Sir William Thiselton- 
Dyer, Sir Harry Veitch, Mr. George Paul, Sir Michael 
Foster, Dr. Masters, and others, a determined return 
to a horticultural course was made, and in steering that 
course William Wilks took a leading part. He was a 
great secretary. A man of wide vision, a fine judge 
of men, courteous, tactful, able to bend men and things 
to the policy the new council had determined upon, 
cautious but ready to seize opportunity, loyal to his 
council and inspiring loyalty, ready with encourage- 
ment, kindly in restraining excess of zeal, an able 
organiser, under him the Society progressed from 
potential bankruptcy to financial prosperity, from a 
membership of about rooo to more than 16,000, to 
the possession of its fine hall and offices, its Journal 
(which he edited from 1888 to 1906), its great garden 
at Wisley, with its school of horticulture and the 
development of research into gardening problems 
which all along he had seen to be essential to sound 
progress, and which, as soon as finance permitted, he 
fostered with all his power. His aim all through was 
to further British horticulture in its widest sense, 
and for his work for the Society, until it had been 
placed upon a sound financial footing, he took not 
even the most modest remuneration. The Society 
to-day is a monument to his work. ; 
_ The gardens of the world, large and small, even 
into the Arctic regions, are the richer for Mr. 
Wilks’s own gardening efforts, for from an aberrant 
field-poppy he raised the wonderful strain of 
Shirley poppies, and freely distributed seed every 
year to all comers. As with his poppies and fox- 
gloves, he deemed no pains too great to spend upon the 
selection and increase of beautiful hardy things, and 
no pleasure to exceed that derived from sharing his 
beautiful things with others. His writings in the 
Journal were of these things. In his quiet garden 
he grew the choicest of hardy fruits, for he was a 
pomologist of no mean order, and he cared for 
and studied there the plants and animals it con- 
tained and attracted, with all the love of a true 
naturalist. 
NO. 2786, VoL. 111] 


Str ERNEST CLARKE. 
Str ERNEST CLARKE, a man of singular ability, and 
gifted in many different directions, was perhaps best 
known as secretary of the Royal Agricultural Society 
of England from 1887 to 1905. 
Himself a Suffolk man, born at Bury St. Edmunds 
in 1856, Clarke had a special interest in East Anglia, 
and contributed largely to the enrichment of its archzeo- 
logy, literature, and folklore. In especial he showed 
himself an adept in unearthing the truth and in de- 
molishing many of the erroneous statements that had 
found their way into past records. This same power 
marked his treatment of agricultural history and 
literature when, as the first Gilbey lecturer, he gave, 
in 1896, his series of lectures at the University of 
Cambridge, from which, in 1894, he had received the 
degree of Hon. M.A. Indeed, one may say that he 
was the first serious student of this subject since 
Arthur Young. 
After service in the Local Government Board, and 
then as assistant secretary in the Share and Loan 
Department of the Stock Exchange, Clarke was 
selected in 1887, out of 106 candidates, to be secretary 
of the Royal Agricultural Society of England in succes- 
sion to the late H. M. Jenkins. As secretary of the 
Society he distinguished himself by his great activity 
and powers of organisation. He had great ideals as 
to the position which such a Society as his should 
occupy as the leading authority both at home and 
abroad, and such he worked constantly to make it. 
For more than eighteen years he acted in this capacity, 
receiving the honour of knighthood in 1898. Later, 
however, came the disastrous days (1903-6) arising 
from the decision of the Council to abandon the 
peripatetic Shows and to have a permanent Show- 
ground at Park Royal, and this resulted in Clarke’s 
resignation in 1905. He then returned to the City, 
and was associated, to the close of his active career, 
with various commercial enterprises. 
Following on the death of his wife in 1918, Clarke 
was struck down with a paralytic seizure, and for the 
last four years of his life was unable to leave his room. 
But he retained to the end the clearness of intellect, 
and the interest in all around him, that had marked 
his active days. 
Though he could never be called an “ agriculturist,” 
Clarke contributed largely to its history and literature, 
and the Journal of the R.A.S.E. contains many ad- 
mirable reports of his, chiefly memoirs of noted 
agriculturists, such as Philip Pusey, Sir James Caird, 
the Duke of Richmond, etc., besides the “ History of 
the Board of Agriculture,” “ Agriculture and the 
House of Russell,’ etc. To the series of King’s 
Classics he contributed, in 1903, a new edition of “ The 
Chronicles of Jocelin of Brakelond,” an account of 
monastic life in the days of Abbot Samson, and he 
‘made many other contributions to archeological, 
historical, and folklore societies. He was an original 
member of the “‘ Confréres ” ; and one of the “ Sette of 
Odd Volumes ’’—being the “ yeoman” in that body, 
and president in 1898. He was also a past-president 
of the Chartered Institute of Secretaries. Clarke was, 
in addition, a gifted musician, a brilliant conversation- 
alist, and a man of much reading and wide general 
knowledge. J. A. VoELCKER. 
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