BAKER : FATHERS OF YORKSHIRE BOTANY. 201 



It is to a Yorkshireman that we are indebted for the first 

 separate monograph on the British ferns. This was James 

 Bolton, of HaUfax, who pubUshed in 1785 the first volmne of 

 his ' Filices Britannicse,' a quarto volume, containing copper- 

 plates and full descriptions of 31 species. A second volume 

 containing plates and descriptions of fifteen additional species 

 appeared in 1790. He was the author also of a ' History of the 

 Fungi growing about Halifax,' published in three volumes quarto 

 in 1788 and 1789, with large plates in which 138 of the Agarics 

 or other large Hymenomycetes are faithfully drawn. Teesdale, 

 as I have already indicated, worked at the Cryptogamia, Dalton 

 and Brunton specially at the Mosses, and Harriman and 

 Robertson collected energetically the Teesdale lichens. 



And now I must concltide. I need not attempt to draw 

 any general moral from my story, The lesson which the 

 biography of men of science should teach is just the same as 

 that of any other men who have left their mark upon the world, 

 a desire to emulate their diligence and their good qualities. If 

 we had in Yorkshire a botanical art-gallery like that which 

 Miss North has lately so liberally given to the nation at Kew, we 

 should be able to decorate a good many of the buttresses with 

 the memorial-plants of natives of the county who have 

 distinguished themselves in botany. Without going beyond the 

 end of the eighteenth century there are upwards of a dozen, and 

 my wish is that our young members, when they look through 

 their London catalogues and colonial floras, should have some 

 definite association of ideas to attach to the names of Johnsonia, 

 Listera, Tofieldia, Salisburia, Fothergillia, Teesdalia, Lawsonia, 

 and the others, and whilst ' the old order changes giving place 

 to new, lest one good custom should corrupt the world,' it is 

 fitting that we, in our meetings such as this, should sometimes 

 turn aside from the work of to-day to thankfully remember and 

 acknowledge what our early predecessors have done for us. 



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