vill Obituary Notices of Fellows deceased. 
The new conception threw a flood of light on many obscure points in 
fermentation generally, and it is not surprising that Ward’s work at once 
attracted the attention of the brewing industry. It led him to an even more 
fertile suggestion, that of metabiosis. It was known that the finest wine is 
sometimes produced from mouldy grapes. He regarded this as a case of one 
organism preparing the way for another. He returned to the subject in 
a lecture given at the British Association at Dover in 1899 and pointed out 
that in the Japanese manufacture of Saké, an Aspergillus prepares the way 
for the yeast. He also showed that metabiosis played an important part in 
nitrification. 
Fungi cannot draw their nutriment from solid materials without first 
profoundly modifying them. They accomplish a large part of their digestion, 
so to speak, externally to themselves. This constantly occupied Ward’s mind. 
He insisted on the part played in the process by ferments. The hyphe of 
Stereum (‘ Phil. Trans.,’ 1898) delignify the walls of the wood elements of 
fEsculus layer by layer, and then consume the swollen cellulose. He failed, 
however, to isolate the ferment which does the work. Nor was he more 
fortunate with the little known fungus Onygena, which grows on horn, hoofs 
and hair, setting free ammonia as a final product (‘ Phil. Trans.,’ 1899). 
That there must be some hydrolysis of keratin can hardly be doubted, for 
Ward established the remarkable fact that the walls of the hyphe contain 
no cellulose, but are composed of chitin. Onygena has, in fact, abandoned a 
plant for an animal nutrition. This would place the germination of the 
species at a great disadvantage. But he found that this difficulty was 
overcome by the spores which had been licked from the skin germinating 
in the gastric juice of the animal’s stomach, and, when voided in the excreta, 
infecting a new host by accidental contact. In the case of both Stereum 
and Onygena he accomplished for the first time the difficult task of tracing 
their life history from spore to fructification. 
Ward had prepared himself for the study of bacteria, and in the nineties 
he undertook, with Prof. Percy Frankland, a prolonged research on behalf 
of the Royal Society as to the conditions of their occurrence in potable 
water. The reports of the results fill a thick volume, and the amount of 
work involved is almost incredible. The bacteriology was entirely due 
to Ward. : 
That bacteria are not an inevitable element in potable water is proved 
by their absence from that of deep springs. They are arrested by filtration 
through the earth’s crust. In any river system they are comparatively 
fewer towards the watershed, and more frequent towards the mouth. The 
obvious conclusion is that they are derived from the drainage of the land. 
As it is known that the bacteria of cholera and typhoid are water-borne, it 
becomes a problem of vital importance to ascertain if river water is a 
possible means of distributing these diseases. Ward set to work to 
ascertain: (i) What was the actual bacterial flora of Thames water; (ii) if 
this included any pathogenic organisms; (iii) if not, what became of them ? 
