1919.] 
New Zealand Institute Science Congress. 
231 
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTICE. 
Leonard Cockayne, Ph.D., F.R.S., President of the New 
Zealand Institute. 
Dr. Leonard Cockayne is the youngest son of the late William Cockayne, 
Esq., of Thorpe House, Norton Lees, Derbyshire, where he was born on 
the 7th April, 1855. As a boy he evinced some partiality for botany and 
collected the wild plants of his county and other parts of England. 
At various schools he received a sound education, including modern 
languages and elementary science. He left England for Australia in 
1876, and after residing in several of the colonies came to New Zealand 
in the year 1880. For four years he was master of the Grey town 
(Allanton) Public School, and it is of interest to know that he there 
taught elementary botany in the form of object-lessons. 
In 1885 he resigned the above position, and for a few years engaged 
in farming near Christchurch. In 1887 a copy of the Hon. G. M. 
Thomson’s little book on ferns came into his hands, and, armed with 
this, he commenced collecting and studying these plants. This quickly 
led to an investigation of the higher plants. These, in the first place, he 
approached from the standpoint of horticulture. By that time he had 
made a garden with an extensive collection of herbaceous and bulbous 
plants. At the beginning of the “ nineties ” this collection, together with 
the indigenous alpine plants he had collected in Canterbury, Westland, 
and Otago, got so large that he decided to remove to a small property 
of acres near New Brighton and devote his life to horticulture and 
New Zealand botany. 
The New Brighton garden grew apace, thanks to a series of exchanges 
instituted with forty or more of the leading botanical gardens of the 
world, so that the collection rapidly increased to thousands of herbs, alpine 
plants, trees, and shrubs. Also a considerable correspondence began with 
many of the famous botanists of the day, and herbaria in Great Britain 
and abroad received many botanical acquisitions. 
In addition to sowing the seeds of exotic plants (about 2,000 species 
yearly) received in exchange for those of New Zealand, Dr. Cockayne also 
sowed many of the latter, and, seeing how greatly a considerable number 
differed from the parent plants, he commenced studying these seedlings 
and instigating experiments connected therewith. 
On the 5th June, 1895, Dr. Cockayne was elected a member of the 
Philosophical Institute of Canterbury, being proposed by his friend 
Mr. R. M. Laing, B.Sc. ; and in 1897 his first scientific contribution was 
read before that body and published the following year. It dealt with an 
experiment with regard to the amount of cold New Zealand alpine plants 
could tolerate. In 1899 there appeared from his pen his first account of 
some of the seedlings he had been studying. In this and subsequent 
papers he was not content with mere descriptions, but sought to correlate 
the seedling’s form with its natural environment and explain the differences 
between it and the adult on what are now termed “ ecological ” lines. 
The same year he also published a paper dealing with reproduction after 
burning of subalpine scrub. This study in what is now known as 
“ succession ” was the first paper on modern ecological lines to appe.ar 
