444 Canadian Record of Science. 



work ; and while still in practice he had attained so great 

 a reputation that in 1851 he was appointed to the chair 

 of geology and natural history in Owen's College, Man- 

 chester. As the college developed, he parted with the 

 less congenial portion of the complex duties of this chair, 

 but retained the professorship of botany till 1892, when 

 he retired, and established himself in the neighbourhood 

 of London, where, with his devoted and amiable wife — 

 a lady intellectually a fit companion for any scientific 

 man — and his youngest son, a promising student of art, 

 he enjoyed the leisure necessary to pursue his favourite 

 studies and the companionship of the many scientific men 

 of that great centre. 



Like most of the greater men of his time, he was less a 

 specialist than is usual with the younger men of science. 

 His earlier papers relate to a variety of zoological and 

 geological subjects, as well as to fossil botany ; and one of 

 his larger publications, that on British Feraminifera, 

 issued by the Kay Society, has long been a standard work 

 of reference on both sides of the Atlantic. 



In later years, however, he restricted himself to the 

 fossil plants of the coal-formation, and more especially. to> 

 the investigation of their structures as revealed by the 

 microscope. He- was attracted to this by the specimens 

 retaining their structure, which are found in nodules in 

 the coal-fields near Manchester as well as in the Scottish 

 coal-fields ; and he laboured day after day on this appa- 

 rently unpromising material, making with his own hands 

 slices for the microscope in the directions necessary to 

 reveal the minute structures. As a mere labour for the 

 eye and hand, this was a herculean task ; but with Wil- 

 liamson it was much more, for he possessed the scientific 

 knowledge and insight which enabled him to put together 

 the structure of a plant from detached fragments, and to^ 

 interpret the true meaning of the parts of mineralized and] 

 often distorted specimens. The writer had the pleasure,' 



