Page:Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Vol 4.djvu/116

Rh Amongst the deceased members, I find twenty-seven on the Home, and four on the Foreign list, including some very consider- able names. I shall now proceed to notice such of their number as have been most distinguished for their scientific labours, for their public services, or for their encouragement and patronage of science and the arts.

Thomas Andrew Knight, of Downton Castle, Herefordshire, the President of the Horticultural Society of London, to the establish- ment and success of which he so greatly contributed, was born in the year 1758. He was educated at Ludlow school, and afterwards be- came a member of Balliol College, Oxford. From his earliest years he appears to have shown a predominant taste for experimental researches in gardening and vegetable physiology, which the imme- diate and uncontrolled possession of an ample fortune gave him every opportunity of indulging ; proposing to himself in fact, as one of the great objects of his life, to effect improvements in the pro- ductions of the vegetable kingdom, by new modes of culture, by the impregnation of different varieties of the same species, and various other expedients, commensurate with those which had already been effected by agriculturists and others in the animal kingdom, by a careful selection of parents, by judicious crossing, and by the avoid- ance of too close an alliance of breeds. In the year 1795 he contri- buted to our Transactions his first, and perhaps his most important paper, on the transmission of the diseases of decay and old age of the parent- tree to all its descendants propagated by grafting or layers, being the result of experiments which had already been long continued and very extensively varied, and which developed views of the greatest importance and novelty in the economy of practical gardening, and likewise of very great interest in vegetable physio- logy. This paper was succeeded by more than twenty others, chiefly written between the years 1799 and 1812, containing the de- tails of his most ingenious and original experimental researches on the ascent and descent of the sap in trees ; on the origin and offices of the alburnum and bark ; on the phenomena of germination ; on the functions of leaves ; on the influence of light, and upon many other subjects, constituting a series of facts and of deductions from them, which have exercised the most marked influence upon the progress of our knowledge of this most important department of the laws of vegetable organization and life.

Mr. Knight succeeded Sir Joseph Banks in the presidency of the Horticultural Society, and contributed no fewer than 114- papers to the different volumes of its Transactions : these contributions embrace almost every variety of subject connected with Horti- culture; such as the production of new and improved varieties of fruits and vegetables ; the adoption of new modes of grafting, planting, and training fruit-trees ; the construction of forcing-frames and hot-houses ; the economy of bees, and many other questions of practical gardening, presenting the most important results of his very numerous and well-devised experiments.

Mr. Knight was a person of great activity of body and mind,