250 
THE JOURNAL OF HOTANT 
It is chiefly as a botanist that Williams will he known to posterity, 
and the following list of his papers, while not claiming to be exhaus¬ 
tive, will give some idea of the extent of his work in that direction. 
H is knowledge of plants was almost entirely derived from herbarium 
specimens, especially those in the British Museum and at Kew—he 
knew little about them in the field, and preserved no specimens. In 
Botany as in other matters Williams had no respect for conventions ; 
his views were strongly individual and even anarchical, which may 
partly account for the comparative neglect of his Prodromus, whereof 
more will be said later. 
Williams’s first paper—an enumeration of the species and varieties 
of Dianthus, including sectional characters and descriptions of several 
new species—was published in this Journal for 1885 (pp. 340-849) 
with a Supplement in 1886 (p. 301). It is in Latin—a language 
which Williams wrote with fluency—and shows that he must by that 
period have made considerable progress in botany for some time before 
committing the results to print. This was followed by a succession 
of studies in Caryophyllacece , with which order his systematic work 
was chiefly concerned ; it was followed by revisions of Gypsophila 
(Journ. Bot. 1889, 199), Tunica (id. 1890, 193), Dianthus (Journ. 
Linn. Soc., Bot. xxix ; 1893), Silene (id. xxxii. 1896) ; Arenaria 
(xxxiii. 189S); VeJezia, Moenchia , and Telephium (Journ. Bot. 
1899, 1901, 1906). In 1898 he began in this Journal the “ Critical 
Notes on Cerastium ,” which, after many years’ interval, were resumed 
in 1921 but never completed ; these contain much information derived 
from Gay’s important MSS. preserved in the Kew Herbarium, the 
neglect of which was a frequent subject of Williams’s animadversion. 
Other papers in this Journal dealing with the Order are “ Pinks of 
the Transvaal” (1889, 199); “ The Disintegration of Lychnis ” 
(1893, 167); “Subdivisions in Silene ” (1894, 10); “A Devised 
List” of British genera and species, with bibliography and notes 
(1896,423); and Stellaria Dilleniana (1910,223), which he was 
the first to distinguish as a British plant. In the Linnean Society’s 
Journal he enumerated and described the Cary ophyllacece of Sze- 
chuen (xxxiv. 426) and of Tibet (xxxviii. 395) ; in the Bulletin of 
the Boissier Herbarium he revised the section Adenonema of Stellaria 
(1907, 830) and described the European varieties of Silene injlata. 
In 1890 he published privately a small volume on The Pinks of 
Central Europe, and in the same year at the Carnation Congress 
read an interesting paper on “ The Carnation from a Botanical Point 
of View,” which was printed in Journ. 11. H. S. xii. 464. 
Williams’s most important contribution to British botany was his 
Prodromus Elorce Britannicce, of which ten parts were issued at 
irregular intervals between 1901 and 1912. The earlier portions 
were reviewed in this Journal (1901-3-4-9-10) by Mr. Hiern, who 
summarised and criticised at some length the author’s methods and 
conclusions. The reviewer’s concluding remark that British botanists 
will find in the Prodromus “ much to interest them and not a little to 
learn ” may be endorsed; a more definite estimate will be found in 
the review of part 9 (op. cit. 1912, 260), where reference is made to 
