PREVIEW: HISTORICAL MEDALS 8 JUNE

The Canadian scientist Abercrombie Anstruther Lawson (1870-1927) was a botanist, who became the foundation professor of botany at the University of Sydney.

Having studied in Canada, Glasgow and California, he achieved his PhD in 1901 before going on to teach at Stanford University for five years.

 

Lawson was appointed lecturer in botany at the University of Glasgow in 1907 and in 1910 was awarded D.Sc. for papers on the special morphology of the Coniferales. He went on to produce "Memoirs on Synapsis, Nuclear Osmosis and Chromosome Reduction", which appeared in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1911–12.

In 1913 Lawson became foundation professor of botany at the University of Sydney, championing laboratory work from the first.

Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1909, he won the Society's Makdougall-Brisbane Prize for the period 1916-1918. The medal was awarded for particular distinction in the promotion of scientific research.

Lawson promoted the study of native plants and joined the campaign which resulted in the Wildflowers and Native Plants Protection Act, 1927, the year he died prematurely following an operation for a diseased gall bladder.

Lawson's brother Andrew was professor of geology in 1899-1928 at the University of California, while another brother, James Kerr-Lawson, was a noted portrait painter, and a portrait by him of A. A. Lawson hangs in the botany department, University of Sydney.

Noonans here offer Lawson's Makdougall Brisbane Medal, with an estimate of £4,000-£5,000.