257 
3n flDemoriam. 
WILLIAM WEST, F.L.S., 1S4S— 1914. 
{Continued from page 2jo). 
But these algological reseaches did not by any means 
exhaust the potentialities of the subject, and led up to another 
line of study, that of the Phytoplankton of lakes and rivers. 
In this the two Wests were pioneers, the first British workers, 
and they took it up in a characteristically full and systematic 
manner. Aided by various grants from the Government 
Grant Fund and the Royal Irish Academy, the detailed in- 
vestigations were commenced about 1900, and western and 
southern Scotland, the English and North Welsh Lakes, those 
of western and south western Ireland, as well as Lough Neagh, 
Malham Tarn, and the Rivers Ouse, Lochay and Bann were 
visited during the holiday seasons of several years. 
The results of these plankton researches proved to be of 
high importance and are summarized in the Proceedings of 
the Royal Society for 1909. From the biological point of 
view the British lakes proved to be of surpassing interest, and 
the researches of the Wests show that the lake-plankton of 
Britain and extreme Western Europe differs completely from 
that of Central Europe, being characterized by the presence 
and dominance of Desmids. The Wests further showed that 
Desmid-plankton only occurred in the lakes of rich desmid- 
areas, also that these were directly correlated with montane 
regions, areas of heavy and persistent rainfall, and — most 
important of all — depended upon the presence of the oldest 
rocks, Archaean and the older Palaeozoic rock formations, 
so that their success in following up this line of investigation 
produced significant results of high scientific value — which 
proved a perfect revelation and surprise to the algologists of 
Europe. 
William West was elected a Fellow of the Linnean Society 
•on the 17th March, 1887, being at the time of his death the 
only one resident in Bradford. 
He was a member of the British Association and a not 
infrequent attender at its meetings, one of the secretaries of 
Section K at the Bradford meeting in 1900, and ever-welcome 
in what the late C. P. Hobkirk used to call the ‘ Yorkshire 
•corner ’ of the reception and smoke-rooms, along with such 
men as Hobkirk himself, Teasdale, M. B. Slater, Davis, Cash, 
Cheeseman, Wager and others. The present President of the 
Yorkshire Naturalists’ Union recalls the pleasantness of these 
gatherings of old friends, and that West’s remarks on topics 
under discussion at the Association were sound and just, 
genial and charitable, as befitted his sympathetic and generous 
1914 Aug. 1. 
