MILES JOSEPH BERKELEY. 
Born 1803. Died 1889. 
( With Portrait). 
The task is never an easy one for those of one generation 
in science to express in a few words the precise nature of the 
debt which they owe to their predecessors. The effect of 
personal influence is always somewhat intangible and neces- 
sarily fades with time. The final verdict of the scientific 
historian cannot be reached except in a more remote per- 
spective. Perhaps in detail it never can be reached satis- 
factorily at all, owing to the difficulty of interpreting rightly 
the ideas of one period in terms of those of another. 
In the case of Berkeley the task seems tolerably clear. In 
the first place he was the virtual founder of British Mycology. 
His labours in this field began in 1836, when he undertook 
for Sir William Hooker the description of the British species 
for that author’s British Flora. He became from this time 
the leading authority in Mycology, at least as far as the 
British Empire was concerned. He is believed to have 
published in all descriptions of some 6,000 species, and this 
enormous labour he accomplished with a skill and precision 
which leaves little room for doubt as to its durability. 
Ten years later his long study of Mycology led him by 
a transition— less obvious then, but which seems natural to us 
now — to the study of the pathology of plants. He was the 
first, perhaps, to treat the subject in a systematic manner, and 
