William Carruthers. 195 



botany, from a student's and intellectual observer's point of view, 

 was given by Mr. Carruthers in his historic lecture at the Royal 

 Institution on Friday, April 16, 1869, on " The Cryptogamic Forests 

 of the Coal Period", printed in this Magazine (Geol. Mag., Vol. VI, 

 pp. 289-300, 1869). 



In it we have a clear and concise description of the vegetation 

 of certainly the most wonderful period of plant-development known 

 in the past ages of our earth, and the author points to the remarkable 

 fact that the vast stores of carbonized plant-remains on which human 

 progress, arts, manufactures, and commerce now depend, were derived 

 from the accumulated growth, not of the highly specialized forms 

 of plant-life which chiefly characterize our present flora, but from 

 humble vascular Ciyptogams, Ferns, Equisetacese, Lycopodiacese, and 

 ' Pill- worts ' (Marsiliaceae), many of which (as the ' Club-mosses ' and 

 ' Horse-tails') attained to giant growths and formed veritable forests, 

 which for ages incalculable must have flourished (homotaxially, if 

 not synchronously) over nearly the whole earth. 



This chapter of the past, written by such an expert as Mr. Carruthers, 

 needs but to be repeated by similar Evangels for every other geological 

 stage to make our earth's past history a veritable fairy tale of delightful 

 literature for all. 



From 1871 to 1880 — when the removal of the Natural History 

 Collections to Cromwell Road took place — the restricted space 

 occupied by the exhibited Botanical Series and the Herbarium itself, 

 at Bloomsbury, precluded the possibility of any great expansion or 

 proper display, and the very life of the Department itself was 

 threatened also by a powerful attempt to capture the Museum 

 Collection and transfer it to Kew. But Mr. Carruthers' evidence 

 before the Royal Commission on Scientific Instruction made so clear 

 a case for the existence of the botanical collections as a part of the 

 great Natural History Collections, in our National Museum in London, 

 as to fully justify and firmly secure its continuance. 



When the removal to South Kensington was effected in 1880, 

 adequate space was allotted to the Botanical Department, and the 

 work of re-arranging both the public exhibits and the collections 

 for the use of students owed much to Mr. Carruthers' talent for 

 organization. 



In labelling and illustrating the specimens in the public collections, 

 moreover, he was one of the pioneers of the system of giving adequate 

 explanations on the labels, thus making the collections far more 

 interesting and instructive to the public. 



The removal to South Kensington necessitated the creation of 

 a Departmental Library, for which a special grant was made. This 

 task occupied Mr. Carruthers for some years, resulting in the formation 

 of what has now become the finest botanical library in the world. 



In 1870 the Linnean Society published Mr. Carruthers' very 

 important monograph " On the Fossil Cycadean Stems from the 

 Secondary Rocks of Britain " (Trans. Linn. Soc, vol. xxvi, pp. 675-708, 

 with ten plates, 1870, 4to). In this work one realizes the advantage 

 of the author having an accurate knowledge of recent plants, both 

 structural and physiological, thus giving to his published opinions on 



