XXIV 



Obituary Notices of Felloivs deceased. 



child, who fell iu Flanders when serving with the artillery. Yet deeply 

 bruised as he was, he carried on bravely, as ready as ever to help others and 

 working as hard as ever. His own loss served only to increase his affectionate 

 sympathy for his friends in like case. 



Early in October, 1919, he fell ill, after a long, cold motor drive from the 

 north, M'here he was held up by the railway strike, and to the illness so 

 acquired he succumbed some three months later, on December 29th, 1919, 

 leaving a gap which cannot be filled, and the memory of a mind and character 

 hardly to be matched in their compelling influence, versatility and charm. 



A. E. G. 



JOHN GILBERT BAKER, 1834-1920. 



John Gilbert Baker was born at Guisborough in Cleveland, Yorkshire, on 

 January 13, 1834. In August of that year his parents, John Baker and his 

 wife, Mary Gilbert, removed to Thirsk, where young Baker spent his early 

 boyhood. In 1843 he was sent to the Friends' School at Ackworth, where he 

 evinced those interests that were to dominate his life by commencing to make 

 a collection of local native plants. In 1846, at the age of twelve. Baker was 

 transferred to the Friends' School at Bootham, York, which had already 

 acquired a considerable reputation for its encouragement of natural study, a 

 vigorous school natural history society having been in existence there since 

 1836. When in his fourteenth year, Baker was awarded for his collection of 

 botanical specimens the annual prize at the exhibition of "out of school" 

 work for 1847, and was appointed curator of the school herbarium. 



Later in 1847, Baker left school in order to assist his father, and for the 

 next eighteen years was engaged in business at Thirsk. But this occupation 

 did not abate the predilection for natural studies developed at Ackworth and 

 disciplined at Bootham. He collected critically, and we find him, at fifteen, 

 contributing to the ' Phytologist,' in 1849, a new record of a rare Carex from 

 Snailesworth Dale. By tlie time he was twenty, his knowledge of the plants 

 of his county enabled him to collaborate with J. Nowell, who dealt with the 

 mosses, in issuing a supplement to the 'Flora of Yorkshire,' published by 

 H. Baines in 1840. This local supplement of 1854 was followed in 1855 by 

 a thoughtful discussion of the relationship of the flowering plants and ferns 

 of Great Britain to their surroundings, and by 1859 his reputation as an 

 authority on British plants was so fully established that he then became the 

 curator and secretary of the still active Botanical Exchange Club. Among 

 those by whom the extent of Baker's knowledge was already fully appreciated 

 was Daniel Oliver, a distinguished young Northumbrian botanist, four years 

 Baker's senior, who, in 1858, had been invited by Sir "William Hooker to 



