The interest aroused by this investigation is shown by the fact that the great German anatomist Kölliker travelled to Manchester, about the year 1851, to see Williamson's preparations.
As regards Williamson's work as a botanist, in which we are chiefly interested in this course, his best contribution to recent botany was no doubt his investigation of Volvox, published in 1851 and 1852, in which he traced the development of the young spheres and the mode of connection of their cells, anticipating the results of much later researches.
He was a great lover of living plants; his garden and greenhouses at Fallowfield, his Manchester home, were of remarkable interest, and he was a keen gardener. At the British Association Meeting of 1887 one of his guests said that "most of the distinguished botanists of Europe and America were in the garden, and not one but who had seen something growing he never saw before[1]." Insectivorous plants and the rarer vascular cryptogams were specially well represented. It was from his private garden that his classes were supplied with specimens.
As we have seen, fossil plants engaged Williamson's attention in his earliest years, when as a mere boy he contributed to Lindley and Hutton's Fossil Flora.
His first important independent work in this field was his paper "On the Structure and Affinities of the Plants hitherto known as Sternbergiae" (1851), in which he proved, for the first time, that these curious fossils, resembling a rouleau of coins, were casts of the discoid pith of Dadoxylon, or, as we should now say, of Cordaiteae—the first step in the reconstruction of this early gymnospermous family. This investigation, to which he appears to have been led almost accidentally, through some good specimens coming into his hands, brought him back, as he says, to his old subject of fossil botany. It was long, however, before he got fairly started on his great course of investigations on Carboniferous plants.
In the meantime he had returned to the Yorkshire Oolitic plants and, about 1847, published a paper in the Proceedings of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society, "On the Scaly Vegetable Heads or collars from Runswick Bay, supposed to belong to the
- ↑ Reminiscences, p. 190.
