iv Obituary. — Henry Harold Welch Pearson . 
seriously thought of returning to England. He was an applicant for the 
Botanical chair at Leeds : 4 My disappointment with regard to the Leeds 
post has been a thing of the past for some weeks. . . . That they should 
insist on seeing a man before appointing him is obviously reasonable, and 
were I on an appointment committee I should take the same line As long 
as I am here I can at least do spade-work in research ’ (July 30, 1907). 
Pearson’s first published paper deals with the anatomy of the seedling 
of the Queensland Cycad Bowenia , a straightforward piece of work carried 
out in the Cambridge Laboratory and undertaken, as I well remember, with 
characteristic keenness. He was always specially interested in the Cycads 
and contributed many important additions to our knowledge of the South 
African representatives of the family, not only directly by his own observa- 
tions in the field, but by stimulating others more favourably situated 
geographically than he was for making regular records bearing on the 
phenomena connected with pollination, and by sending material to England. 
4 1 have to-day he wrote on June 1 1, 1906, ‘got a little more light on the 
pollination question. One of my helpers, a lady living in the Native 
Territories, sends me a lot of notes she made on the growth of the male cone 
of Encephalartos villosus , which are of great interest in this connexion.’ 
She noticed a horrible smell when the sporophylls were open and caught 
several beetles. ‘ Perinquey has identified the beast ; he says it belongs to 
what is considered to be the most ancient group of the Coleoptera — which 
sounds fascinating, but may, of course, mean nothing. Excuse this long 
scrawl. People here don’t care much about these things, and I must inflict 
them on somebody.’ In a later letter he spoke of evidence of insect- 
pollination in Encephalartos Fredericks Guilielmi : ‘the more I see of the 
wool-enveloped cones the more impossible it seems that it can be pollinated 
by any other agency. The cones are all infested by the same kind of weevil 
as that which inhabits E. villosus. The development part of the work is 
a tremendous business. It seems to me that I ought to go on fixing and 
section-cutting about ten years before I write. ... I returned last night from 
the Karroo and Cycad country, having had a very successful time. I had 
a most interesting three days with Encephalartos Fredericki-Guilielmi . It 
is coning freely now, and most cones when I was there were on the eve of 
pollination. As a result of a great number of observations I feel satisfied 
that in the case of a female plant cones are produced only once in six years, 
and very frequently a longer period intervenes. . . . As to coning, it looks as 
if the process taxes the plant very severely, so that it has to rest for some 
years before it can again attempt to produce cones. The first seed-bearing 
plants surely cannot have taken it out of themselves to this extent or they 
could never have left any descendants. Then it must be that these Cycads 
are a long way from the earliest Spermaphyta, and have developed on not 
very sound lines. One defect that suggests itself to me is that they produce 
