228 In Memoriam : William West, F.L.S. 
Woodhouse Moor, Leeds, who died in 1904 after several years’ 
invalidism. 
Their children were three in number — all inheriting natural 
ability of an exceptionally high order. Both sons went 
through brilliant careers at school and afterwards at Cam- 
bridge University, where both of them graduated with the 
highest honours attainable. The elder son, William junior, 
died in 1901 at Mozufferpur in India, within about a fortnight 
of taking up a biological appointment. The younger son, 
■George, is the present Professor of Botany at the University 
of Birmingham, and the daughter, May (Mrs. J. W. Hiigh 
Johnson), possesses scientific and artistic ability. 
In 1886 William West took up science teaching as a pro- 
fession, and later gave up business to devote himself to his 
appointment as Lecturer in Botany at the Bradford Technical 
College, afterwards adding biology and materia medica to his 
■curriculum of work. Here his teaching was remarkably success- 
ful and thorough, and it is supposed that no other teacher 
can have sent up more students to the Royal College of Science 
in London than he did. Enthusiastic, lively, thorough, sound 
and accurate in his methods, he was a born teacher, and 
■commanded the respect and enlisted the affection of his pupils 
to such an extent that, as more than one of them has 
put it, it was more like a father in the midst of his 
family than a teacher with a class, and many of the students 
continued to attend his classes long after their stated 
courses were over. The country rambles that formed part 
of the courses were occasions that brought out the ability 
of the teacher and elicited the best work of the class. Nearly 
all the members of the Bradford Naturalists’ Society have 
attended these classes, and the exceptionally large number 
of original investigators and able naturalists who are included 
in its membership, is in itself evidence as to the effect of his 
teaching and his personality. Even well-known ecologists 
have written to say that they also have been influenced in 
their work by coming under the spell of William West, and 
that in his full knowledge of all kinds of plants they have 
been made to feel how comparatively little they knew. 
His botanical career — apart from the early study and 
training- — began about the year 1877, at the time of the estab- 
lishment of the Yorkshire Naturalists’ Union on its present 
basis. William West was one of the men who made the Union 
- — one of the band of able and competent naturalists who helped 
its first secretaries to make the Union almost at one effort the 
the powerful instrument of local scientific research which it 
has ever since been, during a period of thirty-seven years. 
Attaching himself to the Botanical Section, he succeeded 
Dr. H. Franklin Parsons in the secretaryship of the Section, 
Naturalist, 
