Annual Report of the Council. 119 



the Owens College, Manchester, and three years later was 

 elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. From this time 

 forward his work became more and more specialised, 

 particularly during the "sixties," and numerous papers 

 published at this time show that the line he was con- 

 sciously or unconsciously marking out for himself was 

 that of fossil botany. The publications of this Society, 

 and other scientific journals of the period in question, 

 afford ample evidence of this in the papers he contributed 

 to their pages, of which perhaps the most important are 

 those entitled, " On the Structure of the Woody Zone 

 of an Undescribed Form of Calamite " (1868); "On 

 the Structure of an Undescribed Type of C alamo dendr on 

 from the Upper Coal Measures of Lancashire " (1868) ; 

 " On a New Form of Calamitean Strobihis from the 

 Lancashire Coal Measures " (1870) ; " On the Organisa- 

 tion of Volkmannia Dawsoni " (1871) ; and " On the 

 Organisation of an Undescribed Verticillate Strobilus 

 from the Lower Coal Measures of Lancashire" (1871). 

 Thus at the beginning of the "seventies" he was fairly 

 launched on those investigations of the fossil plants 

 of the Coal Measures which were henceforth to be 

 the principal object of his life's work, and which 

 undoubtedly constitute the crown and glory of his 

 scientific career. At the outset of these investigations 

 Williamson deliberately determined to pursue his task on 

 independent lines, without concerning himself much with 

 the discordant views and statements of other writers on 

 Carboniferous plants. This attitude, with some small 

 modifications, he maintained throughout. From this time, 

 too, with few exceptions, his memoirs on the subject were 

 all communicated to the Royal Society, so that those 

 who have access to the Philosophical Transactions from 

 1871 to 1895 will there find the record of nearly the 

 whole of the important discoveries with which he has 



