XXX 



Obituary Notices of Fellows deceased. 



In 1897 the Eoyal Horticultural Society bestowed on Baker the Victoria 

 Medal of Honour in Horticulture, and in 1899 he was the recipient of the 

 Linnean Medal, the highest honour it is in the power of the Linnean Society 

 to offer. A portrait of Baker, by J. W. Forster, was exhibited at the Eoyal 

 Academy in 1893. 



The service to the State which Baker was able to render as a teacher was 

 marked. The opportunity of imparting useful botanical knowledge to so 

 many men destined to apply it in outlying parts of the Empire has been 

 given to few ; no teacher ever took fuller advantage of his opportunity. 

 Kecognition of this aspect of his labours came late ; it was in 1919 that the 

 University of Leeds conferred on Baker the Honorary Degree of D.Sc. 



Baker owed his eminence as a systematist largely to the circumstance that 

 his fioristic and monographic studies alike are imbued with the spirit of the 

 philosophical natural historian impelled by a sense of duty to attack taxo- 

 nomic problems. The tasks he undertook clearly gave him the utmost 

 pleasure ; the spirit in which they were approached saved him from the error 

 of regarding classification as an end. The identity of the subject of study 

 having been established, his further interest lay in its relationship to its 

 surroundings. He had fully apprehended the effects of environment before 

 (Ecology became a special study. 



He appreciated as clearly the distinction between floristic and monographic 

 study. He realised that the object of floristic work is to facilitate the identi- 

 fication of the plants that characterise a given geographical area, whereas the 

 purpose of monographic work is to determine the affinities of the plants that 

 constitute a particular natural group. His floristic diagnoses, so drafted as to 

 be employed by the uninitiated in identifying with some certainty the plants 

 in which business may cause them to take a practical interest, are divested of 

 those details that are called for only in a monograph. 



The sense of proportion which rendered Baker so distinguished as a 

 systematic writer made him equally effective as a teacher. He used the 

 natural history of plants as a means of educating those on whom he incul- 

 cated the importance of botanical knowledge in everyday affairs. His style 

 was lucid and concise, while he possessed the happy gift of ability to 

 emphasise the salient features of his subject without neglecting its details. 



Baker's published works ensure the perpetuation of his memory as the last 

 of a singularly gifted circle, of systematic botanists. While any of them 

 survive, those who worked with or were taught by Baker will cherish the 

 recollection of one of the kindest and best of men. 



D. P. 



