Abstract
ON May 19, Prof. H. H. Dixon reaches his seventieth birthday, an occasion upon which all his friends would like to offer him their best wishes. In collaboration with his lifelong friend, the late Prof. J. Joly, Dixon developed the cohesion theory of the ascent of sap. This classical work, published in 1894, was the precursor of many physiological and morphological papers, which led to his election to the Royal Society in 1908, and to the award of the Boyle Medal of the Royal Dublin Society in 1917. In 1904, he was appointed to the University professorship of botany in Trinity College, Dublin, a position which he, happily, still continues to adorn. During his tenure of the chair, the new School of Botany (1907) and the new Herbarium (1912) were erected, both largely due to Prof. Dixon's enterprise and the late Lord Iveagh's generosity. His early morphological and cytological work enriched his laboratory with many beautiful slides of nuclear division, and, during the Great War, he published an exhaustive examination of the varieties of mahogany, many of which were used in aeroplane propellers. In 1937, he delivered the Croonian Lecture before the Royal Society in which he reviewed the theory of the ascent of sap. This lecture was illustrated with his distinctive experimental ingenuity. In recent years, among other subjects, he has investigated the alterations in the permeability of plant cells due to electrical stimuli and shown how closely they may be paralleled by the changes in resistance of certain emulsions. His pupils, including many medical men, scattered widely over the Empire, will long remember with affection the tutelary genii of the Botany Lab. T.C.D., “Botany Dick” and his “Mate” Mr. Joe Murray.
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Prof. H. H. Dixon, F.R.S. Nature 143, 813 (1939). https://doi.org/10.1038/143813a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/143813a0