124 Annual Report of the Council. 



walls of his residence — to which reference has already 

 been made — testified not merely to his skill with the 

 pencil and the brush, but to his poetic appreciation of 

 the mysterious beauty of landscape and of colour. The 

 primrose was to him much more than an illustration of 

 vegetable structure. He once told the present writer that 

 his one extravagance was his garden. Two characteristics 

 best recall his personality. One was his attitude with his 

 hands behind his back when he stood gazing down with 

 tender admiration, one might even say rapt adoration, at 

 his flowers ; the other was the bright cheeriness which lit 

 up his face when meeting an acquaintance. His long 

 residence of nearly 60 years in Manchester had given him 

 a pleasant sense, not only of being known to everybody, 

 as he was, but of knowing everybody : and had developed 

 in him a neighbourliness, a camaraderie, which was in 

 harmony with his instincts. The present writer first 

 made Williamson's personal acquaintance at one of the 

 conversaziones on the occasion of the Jubilee Meeting of 

 the British Association at York in 1881. Williamson 

 was standing surveying the crowd, not with a group of 

 scientific friends, but with the Lancashire Burns, Edwin 

 Waugh, and with the old soldier who, nearly 30 years 

 before, had led the attack on the Redan. It was Waugh 

 who performed the ceremony of introduction, and the 

 writer well remembers the pleasure given by Williamson's 

 remark that it was unnecessary, as he had " long known 



young ." Like Angus Smith he had a special 



enjoyment in the society of younger men who had done 

 or were beginning to do something in any walk of life — - 

 men who were, so to speak, " on the margin of cultiva- 

 tion." Hence the generosity with which he gave his 

 time to the junior scientific or other societies of the city 

 in which he lived ; and there were afternoons and evenings 

 at Fallowfield which will be remembered with the never- 



