AFTER forty-one years as head of his Department, Prof. F. E. Fritsch retired from the chair of botany, Queen Mary College, London, on September 30, in his seventieth year. Though scarcely expected in boyhood to live to twenty, his already long and remarkable career has been an arduous one, its keynote continuous application sustained by a powerful sense of the absolute value of knowledge and work. In 1905, during his first appointment as assistant professor (1902-10) at University College, London, he obtained his D.Sc. (London), started a year‘s additional work at Birkbeck College and completed with Boodle the well-known translation of Solereder‘s "Systematic Anatomy". In 1907, when Queen Mary College (then East London College) was first recognized as a school of the University of London, he was appointed to take sole charge of the newly initiated Botany Department, becoming in 1910 its full-time professor with one assistant. His eight years collaboration with Salisbury from 1912 onwards resulted in the five familiar and ubiquitous joint text-books, and were shortly followed by his appointment to the University chair. His large and continuous output of contributions to algal and other botanical literature, even including the re-writing of West‘s "British Freshwater Algæ "which appeared revised in 1927 and the production of his largest work, "The Structure and Reproduction of the Algæ " (2 volumes, 1935 and 1945), though testifying to his unremitting industry, betray only a fraction of the activities he found possible concurrently with routine work and the steady development of his Department, which were rewarded in 1932 by election as a fellow of the Royal Society. He took an active share in the foundation in that year of the British Freshwater Biological Station at Wray Castle, on the Council of which he has acted as chairman ever since. His gift for diplomatic organisation and management has rendered him invaluable on numerous committees, including the Library, Scholarships and Central Research Fund Committees of the University of London.