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 thirteen, on a voyage to Jamaica, where he was so impressed by the tropical vegetation of the interior as to become an ardent botanist. He was apprenticed to his father's profession, studied at the London Hospital, and attended the botanical demonstrations and herborisings of Thomas Wheeler [q. v.], demonstrator to the Society of Apothecaries. Having succeeded to his father's practice at Wellclose Square, Whitechapel, he devoted the early morning hours to collecting plants round London, frequently visiting the gardens of the Messrs. Loddiges at Hackney, and those at Chelsea and Kew. In later years he frequently stayed with his family at Cobham in Kent. Doing his best to cultivate plants amid the increasingly smoky surroundings of his home, and to encourage window-gardening among the working-classes, the chance sprouting of some seedling plants in a bottle, in which, in 1829, he had placed a chrysalis, suggested to him the principle of the Wardian case. These plants grew four years without water. In 1833 he sent two cases containing growing ferns and grasses to Sydney, where they were refilled, their contents reaching England alive, without having been watered, and although exposed to snow and a temperature of 20° F. off Cape Horn, and to one of 120° F. on the equator. In 1836 Sir William Jackson Hooker [q. v.] published an account of the discovery in the ‘Companion to the Botanical Magazine’ (i. 317–20), as an ‘improved method of transporting living plants,’ and Ward himself issued a pamphlet on the ‘Growth of Plants without open Exposure to Air.’ Faraday lectured on the subject at the Royal Institution in 1838, and John Williams (1796–1839) [q. v.], ‘the martyr of Erromanga,’ by means of the Wardian case introduced the Chinese or Cavendish banana from Chatsworth to Samoa, whence, in 1840, George Pritchard [q. v.] took it to Tonga and Fiji. The value of the invention was further demonstrated by Robert Fortune's conveyance of twenty thousand tea plants from Shanghai to the Himalayas, and subsequently by the introduction of the cinchona into India by the same means. From 1836 to 1854 Ward acted as examiner in botany to the Society of Apothecaries; in the latter year he became master, and afterwards treasurer, of the society. He was much interested in the maintenance of the Chelsea Botanical Garden, and arranged the transfer, in 1863, of the herbaria of Ray, Dale, and Rand to the safer custody of the British Museum. He was an original member of the Botanical Society of Edinburgh, acting from its foundation in 1836 as its local secretary for London; and, in conjunction with his neighbours, Edwin and John Thomas Quekett [q. v.], founded in 1839 the Microscopical (now the Royal Microscopical) Society. On retiring from practice Ward removed to Clapham Rise, where he devoted himself to gardening and to the increase of his neatly mounted herbarium, which contained twenty-five thousand specimens. He died at St. Leonard's, Sussex, on 4 June 1868, and was buried in Norwood cemetery. Ward was elected fellow of the Linnean Society in 1817, and of the Royal Society in 1852; his portrait, painted by J. P. Knight, was presented by subscription to the former body in 1856; and his name was commemorated by his friends William Henry Harvey [q. v.] and William Jackson Hooker in Wardia, a genus of South African mosses. His chief independent publication was ‘On the Growth of Plants in closely glazed Cases,’ 1842, 8vo, of which a second edition, illustrated by his daughter-in-law, Mrs. Stephen Ward, and her brother, E. W. Cooke, R.A., appeared in 1852.

[Britten and Boulger's Biogr. Index of Botanists, and authorities there cited.] 

WARD, PATIENCE (1629–1696), lord mayor of London, was the son of Thomas and Elizabeth Ward of Tanshelf, near Pontefract. According to his own ‘Memoirs,’ an incomplete copy of which, made by Dr. Birch, is in the British Museum (Ayscough MS. 4224, f. 153), he was born at Tanshelf on 7 Dec. 1629, and received the name of Patience from his father, who was disappointed at not having a daughter. He lost his father at the age of five, and was brought up by his mother for the ministry. With this view, he tells us, he was sent to the university in 1643, under the care of a brother-in-law, but afterwards turned his attention to merchandise. His liberal education bore fruit, as his name is found in the list of fellows of the Royal Society in 1682, twenty-two years after its foundation. On 10 June 1646 he was apprenticed for eight years to Launcelot Tolson, merchant-taylor and merchant-adventurer, of St. Helen's, Bishopsgate, with whom he lived until his marriage (, St. Lawrence Pountney, p. 242, note h). He afterwards set up in business for himself in St. Lawrence Pountney Lane, where he occupied a portion of the ancient mansion variously known as ‘Manor of the Rose’ and Poultney's Inn, the house having formerly belonged to Sir John Poultney [see or ]. The house is shown in Ogilby and Morgan's ‘Map of London,’ 1677, and in