Obituary. 1890.-The obituary list of the year includes the loss of Thomas Cam, Esq., President in 1871, and Honorary Treasurer of the Club since 1876; and J. H. Knight, Esq., President in 1880. Notices of reference will be found in the minutes of the Club, and also on page 4 of this Volume. 1891.-The obituary list of this year includes, amongst five members deceased, the name of R. W. Banks, Esq. His address as retiring President on February 7th, 1861, will be found in No. 4 of Transactions, which was printed in 1863. Although his attention had been but little given to Geology during the last twenty-five years, his Reminiscences of the Downton Sandstone, see pages 390 to 404, is a contribution to the present Volume, which will be highly appreciated by all Geologists, and indicates a fragment of the great services which he has rendered to Silurian and Old Red Geology. We have also, on page 211 of Transactions, May, 1888, a paper from his pen on "The Four Stones, Old Radnor," illustrated. 1892.-The Club has lost by death two excellent botanists, Mr. T. Bennian Acton, of Wrexham, and Mr. Burton Watkins. Mr. Acton has most diligently attended the Fungus Forays every year since he joined the Club, and was present at the Annual Meeting a few days before his death. He was an able botanist with a thoroughly deep knowledge of plants and plant life, and possessed the rare quality of making abstruse scientific facts plain to his listeners. "The fairy tales of science" were charming to him, and he was always most successful in communicating their charm to others. Mr. Acton had not been in robust health for some time, this last illness, however, was of short duration. The following Obituary of Mr. Burton Watkins is reprinted from the Journal of Botany for October, 1892: Burton Mounsher Watkins died at his residence, Treaddow, near Ross, Herefordshire, on the 30th of July. He was in his 76th year, having been born in December, 1816, in Liverpool. Very early in life his father removed to London, where young Burton Watkins received his education at a school in Mount Street, Grosvenor Square. In London his inherent love of plants first showed itself under somewhat unfavourable circumstances. He used to relate in after years how, when he was a small boy, he pushed himself with difficulty through some railings at Guy's Hospital to obtain some buttercups which were flowering inside. The recollection of his intense childish delight in possessing them did not pass away till old age. Ill-health obliged his father to migrate to Monmouth, when the subject of our notice was about fifteen years old; and in the neighbourhood of Monmouth, and the adjoining parts of Herefordshire, he spent the remainder of his life. His father, in the intervals of his business as a shoemaker, devoted himself to entomology, and is believed to have been the first to capture the Scarlet tiger, Hypercompa dominula, in Monmouthshire. These expeditions first brought out young Watkins's inborn taste for Natural History, and he soon made Botany his especial study. This study he pursued with the most steady and painstaking perseverance; his botanical education being entirely self-acquired, from such books as he could borrow. His habit was to make laborious analyses of these in manuscript. About the year 1844 he began collecting plants on the Doward Hills, in Herefordshire, and in 1845 discovered there Kaleria cristata, a grass which has only twice since that date been noted in the county. Soon after 1845, the discovery by him of Hutchinsia petraa upon the same hills brought Watkins under the notice of Mr. R. M. Lingwood, then residing at Lyston. He visited the Dowards in company with Mr. Watkins, and gave him much encouragement and help in various ways. Professor Babington was at this period (1847 to 1856) in the habit of visiting Mr. Lingwood at Lyston, and joined in affording help and encouragement to the young naturalist. Thus encouraged, Burton Watkins steadily pursued his favourite subject, and became before long an accurate and accomplished botanist. He proceeded to study the Mosses and Hepaticæ, and was a correspondent of Dr. Braithwaite and the late Rev. J. C. Crouch; and he gained an extensive acquaintance with the critical forms of the genus Rosa, and to a less extent with those of the Rubi. Of all these, the Hepaticæ formed his favourite study, and were the last to be relinquished when infirmity and the loss of accurate eyesight obliged him to give up work with the microscope. Watkins's discovery of Riccia sorocarpa, Bischoff, in 1872 upon the Dowards brought him into correspondence with Dr. Carrington and Mr. Pearson; and with the latter especially he maintained a correspondence for many years. We believe that he contributed considerably, through his careful observations, to the knowledge of the life-history of the curious Riccia natans L. Mr. Watkins was too modest to bring the results of his work willingly before the public. He contributed some notes on the flowering of plants at Ross to the Phytologist for June, 1861 (v. 188); and published some notes on the Flora of the Frome and Bromyard districts of Herefordshire in the Transactions of the Woolhope Field Club for 1868 (pp. 164-7). In 1881 he was induced to put on record a summary of his work on the Doward Hills, in an able paper under the title of a "Florula of the Dowards," published by the Woolhope Naturalists' Field Club, of which he was elected an honorary member in 1886. The Flora of Herefordshire was published for the same Society in 1889; and the frequency with which Mr. Watkins's name occurs as an authority for records in that work attests his industry. About 1890 his health began to fail, and he was obliged to forego entirely both his field work and his microscope. This was a great blow to him; but he continued to take great interest in the work of others, and was full of a naturalist's enthusiasm even to the last. He experienced successive heart attacks, which greatly weakened him, and to which he succumbed. A man of very retiring and modest disposition and abstemious habits, Mr. Watkins was not one to be widely known; but he was greatly valued by the few who knew him well. An extensive reader, he was also an acute observer, not only of plants, but also of men. During nearly fifty years he was employed as Relieving Officer, and for a portion of that time as School Attendance Officer, in the neighbourhood of Ross. He performed these onerous and too often thankless duties faithfully and well, and has become in his own neighbourhood a pattern of what such officers ought to be. He gained, during their discharge, a knowledge of the poor, their sayings and their ways, possessed by very few. He was a faithful and generous friend, never thinking any trouble too much which could help another in his work. AUGUSTIN LEY. |