Memorial Address—Hamilton G. Timbei'lake . 
691 
sciences and came to the determination to pursue more ad¬ 
vanced studies in Botany after graduation. 
In college, though he impressed his fellow students as rather 
reserved, he still found himself drawn into taking an active 
part in many of the lines of student activity outside of the class 
room. He was prominent in the work of the literary societies, 
and during his senior year was editor of the college paper. 
After graduating from Lake Forest with the degree of A. B. 
in 1897, he spent two years in graduate work in Botany in the 
University of Michigan, holding first the position of assistant, 
and later that of instructor in Botany. 
In 1899 he took his Master’s degree, presenting a thesis on a 
subject in the line of the cell studies, to which he had deter¬ 
mined to devote himself. In the same year he was made in¬ 
structor in Botany in the University of Wisconsin and in 1903 
was promoted to an assistant professorship. On June 30 of 
this same year he was married to Miss Violet Slack of Madison. 
He had also received an appointment as a research assistant un¬ 
der the Carnegie Institution and was granted leave of absence 
by the University for a year to devote himself to research under 
the Carnegie appointment. 
His death, July 19, 1903, resulted from a fall due, possibly 
in part, to a recurrence of an inherited heart trouble from 
which he had suffered as a child, but from which he had appar¬ 
ently entirely recovered in later years. 
On coming to Madison Mr. Timberlake devoted himself to 
the study of the cytology of the algae, for which the region of¬ 
fers especial advantages, and in the few short years of his work 
here he had already attained results which are of permanent 
and fundamental value to botanical science. His work on the 
processes of starch formation not only gives us for the first 
time an account of the remarkable processes which go on in 
the starch-forming centers in the alga cell, but opens up the 
whole field of the study of metabolism by a new method and 
from a new standpoint. 
It is, of course, especially difficult to judge of scientific work, 
so much of which was incomplete and in the making, but it is 
not too much to sav that Mr. Timberlake’s work had already 
given evidence that he possessed to an unusual degree the qual¬ 
ity of genuine critical insight which discerns the real prob¬ 
lems, the crucial points, for whose solution scientific progress 
