246 Notes and Comments. 
societies of natural history included in the Union, there are 
several thousands of members who devote an appreciable 
portion of their leisure time to the study of various aspects of 
nature, largely by co-operation in the meeting and in the field. 
The University of Leeds appreciates highly these evidences of 
a wide diffusion of intellectual interests in the county, and in 
seeking to enrol among its Honorary Graduates the dis- 
tinguished naturalists who are here to-day, it honours no less 
the much larger number who have helped them to guide and 
increase the love of learning and investigation in their various 
localities. 
HAROLD WAGER. 
From his boyhood, Mr. Wager has been a devoted lover and 
student of nature. Inspired by the teaching of Huxley, under 
whom he studied, and later by Scott, with whom he worked, 
he turned his attention to natural science. Research has been 
the keynote of his life’s work. Neither his duties as demon- 
strator and lecturer in Botany in our Yorkshire College, a 
position which he held with distinction for six years (1888-1894), 
nor his later more unsettled and arduous life as His Majesty’s 
Inspector of Secondary Schools, have diverted him from his 
eager study of biological problems, a pursuit which he has 
carried on uninterruptedly for 30 years. He is the author of 
memoirs and papers on various botanical subjects concerning 
the structure and physiology of the lower organisms and their 
modes of growth and reproduction, and the structure and life 
history of the yeast plant, the response of plants to light, the 
function of chlorophyll, and the behaviour of microscopic 
organisms under the influence of gravity. The value of his 
contributions to science has been recognised by the Royal 
Society, who elected him to the fellowship in 1907, and by the 
committee of the British Association, who made him president 
of the botanical section in 1905. He has filled the presidential 
chairs of the British Mycological Society and of the Naturalists’ 
Union, and is a member of other scientific societies, where his 
single-hearted devotion to science, his keen powers of obser- 
vation and of lucid exposition are widely recognised, and serve 
as an inspiration and encouragement to others. 
THOMAS HUDSON NELSON. 
Thomas Hudson Nelson is the biographer of the Birds of 
Yorkshire. The grandeur of Yorkshire in the extent and 
variety of its surface, in its moors and dales and forests, and 
in its sea-worn cliffs and headlands, and in its sandy bays 
and tidal estuaries, has provided problems of endless scope 
for the ornithologists, and it has needed a succession of many 
ardent naturalists to build up the material for a full representa- 
Naturalis!, 
