1024 . REPORT— 1898. 



SECTION K.— BOTANY. 



President of the Section. — F. 0. Bowee, D.Sc, F.II.S., Regius Professor 

 of Botany iu the Universitj' of Glasgow. 



THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 8. 

 The Peesident delivered the foUowiug Address : — 



Shoetlt before we met last year in the hospitable Domiuioii of Canada, two 

 biologists, whose work relates to the questions I propose to discuss to-day, passed 

 away. In both cases their services to science had received honourable recognition 

 in this country. Johannes Japetus Smith Steeustrup,who had been for more than 

 thirty years a foreign member of the Royal Society, died June 20, 1897, at the 

 advanced age of eighty-four ; Julius vou Sachs, also a foreign member of the 

 Royal Society, died May 29, 1897, aged si.tty-five. 



The former of these, a zoologist, was probably best known in this country for 

 his work on ' Alternation of Generations,' a translation of which was published by 

 the Ray Society in 1845. The title-page describes the phenomenon as ' a peculiar 

 form of fostering the young in the lower classes of animals.' Botanists should 

 remember that this term ' alternation,' which they often use in a sense peculiarly 

 their own, was originally applied to the course of development in certain animals 

 by Chamisso in 1819. The first general statement of the subject from the zoological 

 side was by Steenstrup in the work already named ; even there no mention is 

 made of such phenomena in plants, until the concluding paragraph, where there is 

 an allusion in very general terms to the course of events in the life of seed-bearing 

 plants. But when we remember that it was only in 1848 that Suminski dis- 

 covered the antheridia and archegonia borne upon the prothallus of a Fern, we see 

 plainly that Steenstrup could not have used the term ' alternation ' in the sense in 

 which it is now generally applied to plants. The interest for us as botanists will 

 therefore be that Steenstrup suggested in his work on alternation in animals how 

 in the life of plants successive phases exist, and that these are comparable to those- 

 which he described in many animals. 



The work of Sachs, on the other hand, has influenced every one of us. Some, 

 including myself, have had the great advantage of his direct personal guidance ; 

 all must have derived pleasure as well as profit from his writings. I shall not here 

 attempt any general summary of the achievements of this great man, for that has 

 been done efficiently by the scientific press at large. I shall merely allude to one 

 feature of his work — viz, the style of its presentment to the reader. He was always 

 clear, usually concise. lie was, in addition to his power as an investigator, a 

 master with the pencil, as well as with the pen. It was this combination of qualities 

 which made him the great text-book writer of his time. Never perhaps has a 

 volume more fairly reflected the position of a science at the moment of its publica- 

 tion than did that of Sachs. It resembles the work of a snap-shot camera, and, 



