Annual Report of the Council. lxiii 



doctorate of which he thus celebrated the jubilee. If it is 

 impossible to look without a wondering admiration upon the 

 labours of his fourscore years, the goodwill towards men which 

 •inspired them formed an essential part of his conception of the 

 true man of science. A. W. VV. 



Count Solms-Laubach. — By the death, in November of 

 last year, of Hermann Graf zu Solms-Laubach, botanical science 

 has lost one of its most distinguished members. Though a 

 descendant of one of the most ancient branches of German 

 aristocracy, Count Solms was always one of the most unassum- 

 ing of men, and his unvarying kindliness endeared him to a 

 large circle of botanists both in his own country and in Britain. 



He was born in 1842, and after studying in the Universities 

 of Berlin, Giessen and Freiburg, he commenced his work as 

 a teacher in the University of Halle in 1868, and was subse- 

 quently appointed Professor in the University of Gottingen 

 (1879). I n T §S8 he succeeded De Bary as Professor in the 

 University of Strasburg, where he remained until his retirement 

 a few years ago. 



His knowledge of botany was as extensive as it was thorough. 

 His early investigations were devoted to the study of the struc- 

 ture and nutrition of various groups of parasitic plants, to the 

 knowledge of which he made substantial contributions. He was 

 also interested in cultivated plants, and published some im- 

 portant memoirs on the fig, the papaw, wheat and strawberries. 

 Of his purely systematic works, the monograph of the Acetabu- 

 lariaceas, published in 1895 ' in tne Transactions of the Linnean 

 Society of London, is probably the most important, and of 

 particular interest to us as being written in English. In 1905 

 he published a book on somewhat new lines, on the "Principles 

 of Plant Geography." Probably, however, Count Solms' name 

 will, in this country at any rate, be most closely associated with 

 his "Introduction to Palaeophytology," which was issued in 

 German in 1887 and subsequently in English by the Clarendon 

 Press in 1892. This book not only reveals his encyclopaedic 



