257 



MAXWELL TYLDEN MASTERS 



(1833-1907)- 

 (with portrait.) 



Another noteworthy figure has disappeared from the ranks of 

 British botanists in the person of Dr. Maxwell Tylden Masters, who 

 died at his residence at Ealing on May 80, after a month's illness. 

 He was born at Canterbury, on April 15, 1833. His father, William 

 Masters, was well known in that city, not only as a nurseryman 

 but as a pioneer of social and intellectual work ; he founded the 

 city museum in 1823, and for twenty-three years was its honorary 

 curator. His garden, of which he published a catalogue under the 

 title Hortus Duroverni, was arranged on the natural system, and he 

 made experiments in hybridization in various genera, including 

 Passijfora, of which genus his son became the monographer. 



Maxwell Masters was educated at King's College, London, where 

 he took his degree of M.D., after which he became sub-curator of 

 the Fielding Herbarium at Oxford. While here he devoted much 

 attention to the flora of the county ; a paper embodying the results 



of his observations was published in the Transactions of the Ashmolean 

 Society, to which he had previously contributed, in 1857. He 

 practised his profession at Peckham in 1856, and from 1855 to 

 1868 lectured on botany at St. George's Hospital. It was while 

 at Peckham that he became interested in Vegetable Teratology — a 

 study in which he always took great interest and on which he pub- 

 lished numerous papers. His book on the subject was published 

 by the Ray Society in 1869 ; a German translation by Dammer 

 appeared at Leipzig in 1886. In 1860 Masters became a Fellow 

 of the Linnean Society, to whose Transactions and Journal he 

 contributed many papers, among them valuable memoirs on Passi- 

 floracea and Conifer® — orders with which his name will always be 

 associated and in which he took a special interest. Papers from 

 his pen appeared in numerous scientific journals — many of them in 

 our own pages, beginning with our first volume, to which he was 

 almost the last surviving contributor. 



His chief literary work, however, was of course connected with 

 the Gardeners' Chronicle, of which he became part editor with 

 Thomas Moore in 1865 ; after Moore's death in 1887 the Chronicle 

 was entirely under Masters's direction. Since the paper was 

 established in 1841, many competitors have appeared in the field, 

 but the Chronicle has always held its own, and has been the only 

 horticultural journal which has steadily given prominence to the 

 scientific side of horticulture. Masters always sought the co-opera- 

 tion of botanists, many of whom — Mr. J. G. Baker and Mr. W. B. 

 Hemsley, for example — published largely in his paper ; for many 

 years the portion relating to orchids was under the superintendence 

 of H. G. Eeichenbach ; and the number of new species published 

 during the seventy years of the Chronicle's existence has been very 



Journal of Botany. — Vol. 45. [July, 1907.] u 



