7 
Harry Marshall Ward. 
fortune to superintend the erection of the best equipped Botanical 
Institute in the country, perhaps in the world. It was mine to 
see my old pupil receive the King and Queen at its Inauguration. 
I could not but remember the difficulty I experienced when I 
introduced Practical Examination in Botany at Cambridge, in 
securing a room for the purpose. 
I can hardly doubt that Marshall Ward’s Cambridge work 
was too great a tax for even his vigorous physical powers. He 
added to arduous administration and teaching duties, an exhausting 
amount of mere bread-winning work in Lecturing, Writing, 
and Examining. I think he was burdened with a sense of the 
responsibilities of his position and the necessity of attempting to 
do some sort of justice to those parts of the vast field covered by 
his Chair with which he was least familiar. And he lacked the 
useful gift of “ putting his work out.” 
But new lines of research still occupied his mind. His Ceylon 
work had given him an interest in the Uredinece, which he never 
wholly dropped. Ever since wheat was cultivated in Europe, 
“ rust ” has been its scourge. The last years of Marshall Ward’s 
life were spent in the laborious investigation of the complex 
problems that sprung from the relations of rust-fungi to their 
hosts. He satisfied himself that these cannot be accounted for by 
anatomical characters. What ultimate solution of the problems his 
fertile brain would have suggested to him is unhappily lost to us. 
Incidentally he finally disposed of Eriksson’s mycoplasm. 
The last time I heard him speak, was at the meeting of the 
British Association in 1904. He seemed to me to have lost some¬ 
thing of his old fire, and, perhaps from the habit of Class-Lecturing, 
to labour detail more than was necessary to a scientific audience. 
His health began to fail after this. He seems, however, from 
the first to have doggedly shut his eyes to the fact. I saw him for 
the last time at a Meeting of the Royal Society in the following 
year. The hand of death was obviously upon him : he was wasted 
to a skeleton, and his eyes shone with an unearthly glitter. I 
implored him to take a long leave of absence, and a rest in a 
warm climate. He assured me, however, that he would soon be 
well. He even travelled abroad afterwards, and I believe as far as 
Vienna, to attend the Botanical Congress. But the end came 
more swiftly than I anticipated. 
In this appreciation I have not attempted a systematic survey 
of the whole of Marshall Ward’s work. But 1 have dwelt on 
