Edward Alexander Newell Arber. 
D URING the last quarter of a century Fossil Botany has been pursued 
in this country with great zeal. Among those who have taken 
a leading part in its progress is Newell Arber, who in a too short lifeaccom- 
plished a vast amount of work. 
Arber was be n in 1870, and was the son of Prof. Edward Arber, 
D.Litt., the well-Known authority on English literature. He attended 
King Edward’s High School at Birmingham, where his form-master, 
Mr. Turner, a good naturalist, first roused his interest in Botany. A long 
stay at Davos, for the sake of his health, at the age of fifteen inspired him 
with his lifelong passion for Alpine plants, which culminated in 1910 in his 
book on Plant Life in Alpine Switzerland. He worked at Mason’s College, 
Birmingham, and at University College, London, and in 1893-4 had a year’s 
gardening at the Chiswick Gardens of the Royal Horticultural Society—• 
a valuable practical experience. 
In 1895 Arber went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, and the rest of his 
life was spent at the University. His object was to devote himself to Botany, 
but he was already interested in Geology as well, and took both subjects for 
the second part of the Tripos. It was Prof. McKenny Hughes, always his 
best friend, who led him to work at fossil plants and appointed him Demon¬ 
strator in Palaeobotany in 1899. His earliest publications, however, were 
on recent Botany, and in part on physiological subjects (1899, 1901). His 
first palaeobotanical paper (1901) was on Royle’s Types from India. 
Henceforth his main line of work was on the fossils and their evolutionary 
bearing, though he made an incursion into recent floral morphology in 
1903. Much of his research was on Carboniferous Floras and largely of 
stratigraphical importance; but he was equally at home with impressions 
and with structural specimens, and made most valuable contributions to the 
purely botanical side of his subject. 
In a paper on the Roots of Medullosa anglica (1903), he first demon¬ 
strated the structure of the sieve-tubes. In his description of Cupressino- 
xylon Hookeri , 1904, he named and characterized a Tasmanian fossil tree, 
discovered by Sir Joseph Hooker'over sixty years before. In 1905 he 
described specimens of the seed Lagenostoma , showing the external 
characters and attachment to the rachis. In the same year appeared his 
British Museum volume on the Glossopteris Flora, an important systematic 
work. A paper on the past History of the Ferns (1906) is of great value, 
[Annals of Botany, Vol. XXXII. No, CXXVIII. October, 1918.] 
