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Annual Report of the Council. 117 



Section of the Society, and was its first President. He 

 served the Section as President from 1859 to 1862, and 

 in 1872, 1873, 1886, and 1887; as Vice-President in 1863, 

 1874, and from 1888 to 1891 ; and as member of its 

 Council in the years 1864 to 1871, and 1877 to 1885. 



He was twice married ; first in 1842 to Miss Sophia 

 Wood, daughter of the Rev. Robert Wood, and after- 

 wards, in 1874, to Miss Annie Copley Heaton, niece of 

 Sir Henry Mitchell. He leaves two sons and two 

 daughters. 



In private life he was a staunch friend, and a genial 

 host and companion. During the last meeting of the 

 British Association in Manchester his house in Egerton 

 Road, Fallowfield, was the rendezvous of the many foreign 

 and British botanists who attended that meeting. When 

 these latter were photographed, by common consent he, 

 with his friend, the late Dr. Asa Gray, formed the centre 

 round whom they grouped themselves. He had gifts 

 of language, which enabled him to marshal his facts 

 and arguments with great perspicuity, so that his hearers 

 were never at a loss to understand his meaning. The 

 same clearness of thought characterises his writings. His 

 habit was to go directly to the heart of any subject he was 

 discussing. His viva voce summaries of his communi- 

 cations to the Society were models of simplicity and 

 exactness of expression. To these gifts he added a 

 singularly graphic power of delineating on the black- 

 board the salient features of any object he was describing. 

 His class-rooms at college, and the walls of his home, 

 were covered with his own beautiful drawings of animal 

 and vegetable life, and of scenery. His great skill in the 

 delineation of the structure of the fossil plants of the coal- 

 measures is seen in the admirable and copious illustrations 

 of that group in the Philosophical Transactions of the 

 Royal Society. C. B. 



