Walter Gardiner, 1859—1941

Abstract

Having had the unique privilege of working with Walter Gardiner on ‘The Continuity of Protoplasm’ for several years in his private laboratory in his garden at St Awdrey’s, Hills Road, Cambridge, I feel it a great honour to be asked to write a notice of his life and work for the Royal Society. Unfortunately, when I went up to Cambridge in 1894, hi the last year of Professor C. C. Babington’s life, Gardiner was not lecturing to the elementary students, but only to those taking advanced botany for the second part of the Tripos. By the time I was taking Part II (1897-1898) Gardiner had resigned his University Lectureship—he did this in 1897 soon after Marshall Ward was elected Professor of Botany at Cambridge—so, unfortunately, I never attended any of his brilliant lectures, over which he took infinite pains, as he did in all his work. I was also too young to hear his remarkable evening lecture at the British Association Meeting at Newcastle in 1889, or his equally striking afternoon lecture at the Royal Institution in 1888. These lectures, alas, were never published. Something of his outstanding ability as a lecturer I have gleaned from chance remarks in our talks in his laboratory and from one or two botanists still living, who attended them. This preface will explain why much that should have been included of the earlier years of a brilliant and outstanding personality cannot be adequately recorded, for very few of his contemporaries are now living and recollections have faded.