William Henry Lang

Prof William Henry Lang FRS[1] FRSE FLS LLD (12 May 1874–29 August 1960) was a British botanist.

William Henry Lang
Born12 May 1874
Withyham, Sussex
Died29 August 1960(1960-08-29) (aged 86)
Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, England
NationalityUnited Kingdom
Alma materUniversity of Glasgow
Known forresearch into the nature of Psilophyton and discovery of sporangium on the prothallus of ferns
AwardsRoyal Medal (1931)
Linnean Medal (1956)
Fellow of the Royal Society[1]
Scientific career
FieldsBotany
InstitutionsUniversity of Manchester
University of Glasgow

Life

The son of Thomas Bilsland Lang, a medical practitioner, and his wife Emily Smith, he was born in Groombridge in Sussex on 12 May 1874.[2]

Lang was educated at Dennistoun Public School in Glasgow before being accepted into the University of Glasgow, where he graduated with a Bsc (Hons) in botany and zoology in 1894. He qualified for medicine in 1895 but never became a practicing doctor; thanks to his own enthusiasm and the encouragement of his teacher Frederick Orpen Bower he instead became a professional botanist.[3] His first research was on the structure of ferns, something Bower was apparently an authority on, and Lang soon followed him in that regard. He moved to study at the Jodrell Laboratory on a Robert Donaldson scholarship in 1895, where he focused on the apomixis of ferns, and discovered a sporangium on the prothallus of a fern at a time when biologists were exploring alternate means of reproduction in plants.[3]

In 1899 he travelled to Sri Lanka and Malaya to study tropical cryptogams and collect samples, returning to Britain in 1902, when he became a lecturer at the University of Glasgow; while there he worked closely with D. T. Gwynne-Vaughan and Bower, with the three of them being known as the "triumvirate".[3] After Gwynne-Vaughan's death in 1915[4] he studied preserved plant remnants in Aberdeen, making great insights into the nature of Psilophyton, which until then had been neglected.[3] In 1900 he was awarded a Doctor of Science degree by the University of Glasgow, and when the Barker chair of cryptogamic botany was created at the University of Manchester Lang was the first choice.[3] He took up his duties in 1909.

In 1911 he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society[1] and was awarded a Royal Medal in 1931 for 'his work on the anatomy and morphology of the fern-like fossils of the Old Red Sandstone.'[5] In 1926 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His proposers were Frederick Orpen Bower, Sir John Graham Kerr, Diarmid Noel Paton and George Alexander Gibson. He won the Society's ]Neill Prize for the period 1915-1917.[6]

In 1932 he received an honorary doctorate (LLD) from the University of Glasgow, followed by a second honorary doctorate from Manchester University in 1942. He was also a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

After his retirement he moved to Westmorland. His wife died in 1959 following a period of ill-health, and he followed barely a year later at his home in Milnthorpe on 29 August 1960.[3]

Family

He married his cousin, Elsa Valentine, in 1910. They had no children.

Publications
  • A Textbook of Botany (1912)
  • Makers of British Botany: William Griffith (1810-1845) (1913)
  • Palaeobotany (1926) co-written with Robert Kidston

Botanical References
gollark: Can you generate and detect different *colors*?
gollark: Assuming you can switch the light on and off pretty fast, and the magic can respond quickly, you might actually get decent data rates out of it.
gollark: Well, in that case I guess you could do automatic Morse code (or some variant), and if you could make a bright enough light (and maybe focus it on the receiving tower with mirrors or something), that might be longer-range than having to actually see the individual semaphore arms.
gollark: Oh, right. Hmm.
gollark: You probably could do an actual Morse code light, but I think if you can only move things around and heat them instead of actually generating light directly it would be more efficient to do the movable arms thingy.

References
  1. Salisbury, E. J. (1961). "William Henry Lang. 1874-1960". Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society. 7: 146–160. doi:10.1098/rsbm.1961.0012.
  2. Biographical Index of Former Fellows of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 1783–2002 (PDF). The Royal Society of Edinburgh. July 2006. ISBN 0 902 198 84 X.
  3. "The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography". 2004. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/34399. Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  4. b., F. O. (1915). "Prof. D. T. Gwynne-Vaughan". Nature. 96 (2394): 61–63. doi:10.1038/096061a0.
  5. "Awards". Retrieved March 5, 2013.
  6. Biographical Index of Former Fellows of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 1783–2002 (PDF). The Royal Society of Edinburgh. July 2006. ISBN 0 902 198 84 X.
  7. IPNI.  W.H.Lang.

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