Jump to content

Page:Makers of British botany.djvu/18

From Wikisource
This page has been validated.
4
INTRODUCTION

mainly devoted to making known in England the great discoveries of the Hofmeisterian epoch. To Henfrey belongs the credit of being the first of our countrymen to recognise the full significance of the new morphology, the general recognition of which, however, he did not live to see. Henfrey was an extremely competent all-round Botanist whose single-minded devotion to his subject should not be allowed to fall into oblivion.

William Henry Harvey is a representative of a numerous class among the followers of Botany in this country. A man of great personal charm and high culture, he was attracted into the subject from the love of collecting. His special field was that of the Marine Algae, in which he stood unrivalled. Harvey was an exquisite delineator of the seaweeds of which he was so enthusiastic a student. The memoir, based on his journals and letters, which was published shortly after his death, is a book well worth reading for its intimate sketches of the naturalists of his day and the vivid notes on his extended travels in the colonies and elsewhere.

Miles Joseph Berkeley, like his contemporary Harvey, was a cryptogamic botanist. He was a voluminous contributor to the systematic literature of the Fungi over a period of fifty years, as well as being a pioneer in the field of plant pathology. The systematic collections accumulated during his long life form one of the glories of the Kew Herbarium.

Sir Joseph Henry Gilbert's outlook on plants was entirely different from that of any of the foregoing. He regarded the plant essentially as the chemical offspring of the environment to which it was exposed. His life was devoted to the study of soils and crops in conjunction with Sir John Lawes. To these classic investigations carried out at Rothamsted, Gilbert brought the trained skill of the chemist.

William Crawford Williamson was a great all-round naturalist of the Victorian period whose work as a Zoologist gained him high distinction long before his attention became seriously concentrated upon his famous studies into the structure of the fossil plants of the Coal Measures. Though these researches were pursued without any marked contemporary