Harry Marshall Ward. Xili 
Ward regarded this as a case of education. Working on this principle, he 
succeeded by growing the parasite successively on a series of allied species 
which were imperfectly resistant, to ultimately educate it to attack:a species 
hitherto immune. He called these “ bridgeing species.” He established, in 
fact, a complete parallelism between the behaviour of rust-fungi and that of 
pathogenic organisms in animals. 
In the midst of this far-reaching research his health began to fail. In 1904 
he had been appointed by the Council to represent the Royal Society at the 
International Congress of Botany held at Vienna in June of the following 
year. This he attended, though more seriously ill than he was aware of. On 
his way back he spent three weeks for treatment at Carlsbad, but receiving 
no benefit, he went, on the advice of Dr. Krause, to Dr. von Noorden’s Klinik 
at Sachsenhausen (Frankfort). Nothing could be done for him, and he was 
advised to return home by easy stages. After a period of progressive and 
extreme weakness, borne with unflinching courage, the end came somewhat 
suddenly at Torquay on August 26,1906. He was buried at Cambridge in 
St. Giles’s Cemetery on September 3. 
From 1880, the year following his degree, Ward never ceased for a 
quarter of a century to pour out a continuous stream of original work. This 
alone would be a remarkable performance, had he done nothing else. But he 
was constantly engaged in teaching work, and he acted as examiner in the 
Universities of London and Edinburgh. With no less conscientiousness he 
complied with the demands which the scientific world makes on its members ; 
he served on the Councils of the Royal (1895) and Linnean (1887) Societies ; 
he was President of the Botanical Section of the British Association at Toronto 
in 1897, and of the Cambridge Philosophical Society in 1904. Beyond all this 
he found time to give addresses with unfailing freshness of insight; a 
lecture at the Royal Institution on April 27, 1894, on the “Action of Light 
on Bacteria and Fungi” was a notable performance; he wrote numerous 
articles of a more popular kind, and he produced a number of excellent 
manuals for students on subjects connected with forests, agricultural and 
pathological botany. Activity so strenuous almost exceeds the limits of 
human possibility. 7 
Under the influence of Sachs, Ward might have become a distinguished 
morphologist. But his work in Ceylon led him intoa field of research from 
which he never deviated. A survey of his performance as a whole, such as I 
have attempted, has a scientific interest of it own. His research was not 
haphazard. <A continuous and developing thread of thought runs through it 
all. The fundamental problem was the transference of the nutrition of one 
organism to the service of another. Of this, in Ceylon, Ward found himself 
confronted with two extreme types, and of both he made an exhaustive study. 
In Hemileia it was ruthless parasitism; in Strigula advantageous com- 
mensalism. Our Foreign Fellow Bornet put Schwendener’s theory on a firm 
foundation when he effected the synthesis of a lichen; Ward, in another 
group, did the same thing for the ginger-beer plant. In such cases the 
