Prof. C. E. Moss

Abstract

THE death on Nov. 11 last of Prof. C. E. Moss, at his home in Johannesburg, at the age of sixty, is a serious loss to South African botany and to systematic botany at large. Charles Edward Moss was a native of Cheshire, the youngest child of a Nonconformist minister who settled at Halifax in 1874. He gained his early education at elementary schools in that town, eventually becoming a pupil-teacher. At the age of twenty-three he had a serious illness and his convalescence involved spending much time in the open air. This led to a keen interest in field botany and close acquaintance with the local naturalists, who were at that time a very active body. Moss thus became a competent field botanist before he was able, at twenty-five years of age, to go to the Yorkshire College, Leeds, and work for his degree as well as his teacher's certificate. At Leeds he found Miall's teaching and outlook very acceptable, and in 1896, when the late Dr. W. G. Smith went to Leeds as lecturer in botany, Moss was greatly attracted by the new method of studying and mapping plant communities in the field which had been inaugurated in Scotland by Smith's elder brother Robert.