William Crawford Williamson, LL.D., F.RS. 445 



of his friendship, and of more than once enjoying his hos- 

 pitality at Egerton Koad, near Manchester, where he not 

 only had his studio, as it might be called, but a botanical 

 garden on a small scale, replete with rare and interesting 

 plants more or less illustrative of ancient vegetation. To 

 those who had the privilege of seeing him at work, nothing 

 could be more charming than his enthusiastic pursuit of 

 new facts, and the exultation with which he welcomed 

 them when found. In this he resembled Lyell more than 

 any other scientific man of my acquaintance. 



As a worker in fossil plants and in the microscopic 

 structure of coal, Williamson's collections were most 

 attractive to me, but showed at once that it was hope- 

 less to rival his work ; and from the time when I made 

 his acquaintance I recognized this fact, and directed to 

 his mill any pakeo-botanical grist of the structural kind 

 that came in my way. 



In explanation of the nature of his work, it may be 

 stated that while some coal-formation plants — as the ferns, 

 the smaller Lycopods or club-mosses, and some trees allied 

 to the pines — have structures very similar to their modern 

 allies, others are widely different from any modern plants 

 both in structure and in those characters of their surfaces 

 and appendages which are related to the characters of the 

 stem. In addition to this, while their fruits ally them 

 with the nowerless or cryptogamous plants, their stems 

 assume complexities of structure which, in the modern 

 world, we find only in the flowering plants, and in the 

 kinds of these that possess woody stems. After all, this 

 is merely an arrangement to give strength to larger and 

 better developed forms than those of modern times ; but 

 at first it was wholly at variance with orthodox botanical 

 rule, and Williamson had first to reconcile himself to it and 

 then to convince his scientific friends. The work is not 

 yet complete. I have sent to Williamson slices of stems 

 from Canada quite as anomalous as any he had figured, 



