William Henry Lang

Background

Ethnicity: Lang's father was English; his mother came from Ireland.

William Henry Lang was born on May 12, 1874, in Withyham, Groombridge, Sussex, England. His father, Thomas Bisland Lang, was a doctor; he died at the age of thirty-four when his son was only two. His widow moved to Bridge of Weir, then a small village fourteen miles from Glasgow, where her husband’s parents lived.

Education

In Bridge of Weir Lang attended the village school before proceeding to Denniston School in Glasgow and thence to the University of Glasgow in 1889, when he was fifteen. He graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in 1894 with honors in botany and zoology, and in 1895 with the Bachelor of Medicine degree with high commendation. In 1900 he received a Doctor of Science degree.

Career

Although Lang registered as a doctor, he never practiced but became a junior assistant in botany under Frederick Bower. A year later Lang was awarded a Robert Donaldson scholarship, which enabled him to work under D. H. Scott, keeper of the Jodrell Laboratory at Kew. In the following year, Lang returned to Glasgow to become a senior assistant in botany. At that time D. T. Gwynne-Vaughan was the junior assistant. In 1909 Lang left Glasgow to become a Barker professor of cryptogamic botany at the University of Manchester. After retirement in 1940, Lang continued for a time to reside in Manchester, working in the Manchester Museum but eventually moved to Storth near Milnthorpe in Westmorland, where he died.

Lang’s earliest research on apogamous reproduction in ferns was carried out at Kew but had begun in Glasgow as a result of Bower’s kindred interest in apospory. Bower favored the view that the sporophyte was a new development from the zygote interpolated between two sexual generations and developed by progressive sterilization. He stated this theory in a paper entitled “On Antithetic as Distinct From Homologous Alternation of Generations in Plants” (1890). D. H. Scott ardently supported the homologous theory, and Lang likewise pointed out that the examples of apogamy he described suggested that the two generations were not as distinct as the antithetic theory supposed.

Lang’s interest in alternation of generations led him to investigate apospory in Anthoceros laevis and the prothallia in Lycopodiales and Ophioglossales. To obtain specimens he visited Ceylon and Malaya in 1899 and brought back Helminthostachys zeylanica, Ophioglossum pendulum, and Psilotum. In these the prothallia are saprophytic by virtue of a symbiotic fungus, whereas in Lycopodium cernuum the prothallium has green photosynthetic lobes, a condition Lang regarded as being more primitive. In 1909 Lang published a paper on a theory of alternation of generations based on ontogeny, and as a result a discussion on “alternation” was organized at the Linnean Society.

Apart from two papers on the microsporangia and ovules of Stangeria paradoxa (1897, 1900) all of Lang’s earlier research was on living cryptogams, including the cone structure of Lycopodium cernuum (1908) and the anatomy and morphology of Botrychium lunaria (1913) and of Isoetes lacustris (1915). This earlier period of research was abruptly concluded by the unexpected death of D. T. Gwynne-Vaughan, at the age of forty-four, in 1915. The latter had collaborated with Kidston on a study of fossil Osmundaceae; and together they had commenced a series of papers on the Lower Carboniferous flora of Berwickshire, of which only part I was published in 1912. In that year William Mackie, erstwhile schoolmaster and then medical practitioner in Elgin discovered the plant-bearing cherts of Rhynie in a dry-stone wall during one of his frequent geological excursions to central Aberdeenshire. Kidston took in hand further work to locate the chert bed in situ by having trenches dug under the supervision of David Tait of the Geological Survey. According to Crookall (1938), Lang visited Kidston at Stirling in 1915 to discuss the possibility of continuing the investigation of the Lower Carboniferous petrified plants; but it was decided to defer this in order to describe the silicified plants of the Rhynie chert. This they did in five classic papers (1917-1921), and these ancient vascular plants (probably Lower Devonian) have now become familiar to all students of botany under their generic names of Rhynia, Hornea (now Horneophyton), and Asteroxylon.

After Kidston’s death in 1924 Lang continued the investigation of pre-Carboniferous plants until about 1945. With Isabel Cookson he described vascular plants from Australia that were apparently of Silurian age (1935), and with W. N. Croft he described Lower Devonian plants from Wales (1942). His last publications were obituaries of J. E. Holloway (1947) and F. O. Bower (1949).

Achievements

• William Henry Lang went down in history as a prominent botanist, best known for his studies of the silicified plants of the Rhynie Chert bed of the Devonian period, the anatomy and morphology of the fern-like fossils of the Old Red Sandstone, and preserved plant remnants in Aberdeen, making great insights into the nature of Psilophyton.
  
  Lang won the Neill Prize of the Royal Society of Edinburgh for the period 1915-1917. He was also awarded the Royal Medal in 1931 for "his work on the anatomy and morphology of the fern-like fossils of the Old Red Sandstone."
  
  In 1900 he was awarded a Doctor of Science degree by the University of Glasgow. In 1932 he received an honorary Doctor of Law degree from the University of Glasgow, followed by a second honorary doctorate from Manchester University in 1942.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London: Containing Papers of a Mathematical Or Physical Character, Volume 190

    (The book contains Lang's work On Apogamy and the Developm...)

    1898
  • Annals Of Botany, Volume 13 1899

Views

Lang’s botanical interests were greatly influenced by F. O. Bower, D. H. Scott, and Robert Kidston. According to Lang, Bower was an inspiring teacher, and in a biographical memoir Lang wrote: “To enter Bower’s class for the first time was an arresting experience, as I found in 1890.” Both Bower and Scott were greatly influenced by W. C. Williamson, whom they visited in 1889 at Manchester to study his sections of Carboniferous fossil plants. Henceforth, Scott was devoted to paleobotany, while Bower determined to study the existing Pteridophyta, especially with regard to the problems of alternation of generations and the origin of a land flora.

Membership

In 1926 Lang was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He was also a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

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  Fellow

  Royal Society of Edinburgh , United Kingdom

  1926 - 1960

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  Member

  Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences , Sweden

Connections

Lang married his cousin, Elsa Valentine, in 1910. They had no children. His wife died in 1959 following a period of ill-health.

Father:

Thomas Bisland Lang

Spouse:

Elsa Valentine

Spouse:

Elsa Valentine

colleague:

D. H. Scott

References

• Dictionary of Scientific Biography, Volume 7
  1973