August 9, 1895.] 



SCIENCE. 



147 



paleontologists that I knew would make 

 good use of them. * * * 



" I am so glad that you have written 

 direct to me about the affaii-, because yours 

 is precisely the sort of case that I contem- 

 plated in my letter to Dulau & Co. I will 

 send the set of 12 memoirs to jou and beg 

 that you will accept them from me." 



William Crawford Williamson was born 

 November 24th, 1816, at Scarborough, in 

 Yorkshire. We are fortunate in having a 

 most admirable sketch of his life by Mr. 

 Charles Bailey, F. L. S., published in the 

 Manchester Scientific Student's Annual Ee- 

 port for 1886, which sets forth the principal 

 facts in connection with his early life and 

 also contains, as a frontispiece, an excellent 

 portrait of him at that date. In this paper 

 Mr. Bailey says : 



" Circumstances had made Professor Wil- 

 liamson's father a gardener bj^ profession, 

 but nature had made him a geologist, and 

 placed him in one of her most valuable 

 domains, viz., on the Oolitic and Cretaceous 

 rocks of Yorkshire. The late Professor 

 Phillips tells us in the preface to the third 

 edition of his classical work, Ilhistrations of 

 the Geology of Yorkshire, how he had, in com- 

 pany \sdth his uncle, William Smith, ' the 

 Father of English Geology,' gathered fossils 

 Taeneath the romantic cliffs of Whitby and 

 Scarborough, but that in 182-± he had the 

 good fortune to become acquainted with 

 two of the most valuable of all his early 

 fiiends, Mr. William Bean and Mr. John 

 Williamson (the father of the future pro- 

 fessor), and to profit by their admirable 

 collections of recent and fossil shells, Crus- 

 tacea, echinida and corals, dredged from 

 the neighboring sea, or hammered out of 

 -the adjacent rocks. The father naturally 

 trained his son William to pursue studies 

 which were so fascinating to himself, and, 

 in consequence, the father and the son be- 

 came inseparable companions." 



But the Williamsons were not people of 



great means, and the young scientist had 

 to be apprenticed to a surgeon in Scarbor- 

 ough, where he remained from 1832 to 1835. 

 It was during this period that he furnished 

 the data above mentioned, to Lindley and 

 Hutton's Fossil Floi-a, but he also published 

 over his own name a number of papers on 

 various other subjects, which displayed a 

 wide knowledge of nearly every branch of 

 natural history. These contributions gained 

 for him the curatorship of the Natiiral His- 

 tory Society of Manchester, where he re- 

 mained the next three j^ears. He studied 

 medicine and surgerjr, and in 1840 became 

 a member of the College of Surgeons, and 

 held several important positions, including 

 that of Active Surgeon to the Chorlton-upon- 

 Medlock Dispensarj^ In 1851 he became 

 Professor of Natural Historj^ and G-eology 

 at Owens College, Manchester, and from 

 that time until 1892 he followed the for- 

 tunes of this noted institution. Then, at 

 the age of 76, he retired from professional 

 labors in order to give himself up exclu- 

 sively to his great work on fossil plants. 



Professor Williamson's labors were by no 

 means confined to vegetable f)aleontology, 

 and his contributions to other branches of 

 natural historj^ are only less celebrated 

 than those in this field. Mr. Bailey has 

 passed these labors in review in a very sat- 

 isfactory manner, and I must refer the 

 reader to this sketch for an account of 

 them, confining mj'self to the only subject 

 on which I am at all capable of expressing 

 an opinion. In 1842 he wrote upon the 

 ' Origin of Coal,'* and in 1854, he returned to 

 the study of the cj'cadean plant, Zamia 

 gigaSj'j of which he had fai-nished the sketch 

 for Lindlejr and Hutton,J and upon which 



*Brit. Ass. Kept., 1842, Pt. 2, p. 48. 



t For such he still modestly called It, although in 

 the paper that immediately follows his in the Trans. 

 Linn. Soc, Mr. William Carruthers renames this plant 

 Williamsonia, thus founding one of the best marked 

 genera of fossil plants. 



tFoss. Fl., Vol. III., p. 45, pi. clxv. 



