H. H. W. PEARSON, F.R.S., Sc.D. (Cambridge) 
By A. C. SEWARD, 
Professor of Botany and Master of Downing College, Cambridge. 
Harold Henry Welch Pearson was born at Long Sutton, Lincolnshire, 
on January 28, 1870, and died on November 3, 1916, at the Mount Royal 
Nursing Home, Claremont, Cape Town. He had been ill for several weeks and 
after recovering from the effects of an operation for hemorrhoids he contracted 
pneumonia which caused his death : it is suggested by the author of an 
Obituary Notice in the South African College Magazine that an attack of malaria 
in 1913 in Portuguese West Africa was the beginning of the undermining of 
his never very robust health. Pearson was educated privately : after holding 
a teaching post in a school at Eastbourne he obtained a Cloth workers’ Exhibi- 
tion and entered the University of Cambridge as a Non-Collegiate student in 
1893. He obtained a First Class in both parts of the Natural Sciences Tripos 
(1896 — 97). In October 1896, after taking his Bachelor’s degree, he entered 
Christ’s College and was elected Scholar in the following June. In the 
same year he went to Ceylon with the assistance of a grant of £100 from the 
Cambridge University Worts Travelling Fund, the additional cost of the visit 
being generously defrayed, as Pearson states in his account of the Ceylon 
work, by his very good friend the Rev. Herbert Alston. In 1898, in con- 
sequence of his election to a Frank Smart Studentship, he became a member 
of Glonville and Caius College. He was appointed Assistant Curator of the 
Cambridge Herbarium in 1898, and in 1899 he was awarded the Walsingham 
Medal for his work on the vegetation of the Ceylon Patanas. He was appointed 
Assistant (for India) in the Herbarium of the Royal Gardens, Ivew. in 1899 
and two years later was transferred to the Director’s office. In 1903 Pearson 
was elected to the Harrv Bolus Professorship of Botany at the South Alrican 
College, Cape Town, and took up his duties in April of that year. The 
relations between Dr Harry Bolus and the first occupant of the chaii 
bearing his name were always most cordial. The confidence felt by the oldei 
man in the younger and expressed by many acts of kindness was repaid with 
the respect and affection which he received in return. In a biographical 
sketch of Dr Bolus Pearson described him as “a man who, one would think, 
almost unknown to himself, has played a great part in the establishment of 
Botany as a science in South Africa,” a description that would also apph to 
