His remarkable skill as a draughtsman (for all his memoirs are illustrated by his own hand) is not always done justice to in the published reproductions as the fine examples of his original drawings, so kindly lent for the lecture by Mrs Williamson, will show[131]. At the time when Williamson's main work was in progress--from 1870 to 1892--geologists were probably more appreciative of its value than botanists. Happily, in spite of occasional trouble with Referees, none of his work was lost, the Royal Society going steadily through with all the nineteen memoirs which were entrusted to them.
The one botanist, who, up to the year 1890, estimated Williamson's work at its full value was Count Solms-Laubach, who makes the honourable boast that he knew Williamson's collection as no one else did.
Williamson's writings are not easy reading, especially for the modern botanical student, for the terminology is often unfamiliar, and the arrangement of the matter unsystematic.
It would be out of place to enter on a criticism of details, but it is necessary to call attention to the one serious mistake which ran through much of Williamson's work, though at the last he to a great extent corrected it himself. He was always too ready to interpret specimens of the same fossil plant which differed in size and anatomical complexity, as developmental stages of one and the same organ. Such differences among fossils are more often due to the order of the branch on the plant, or to the level at which a section is cut. This error led to some mistaken, and indeed impossible views of the process of development. I mention this partly because I have noticed the same fundamental mistake in the work of much more modern writers. "We are none of us infallible--not even the youngest of us," and among the latest fossil-botany papers I have read, I have detected the very same confusion between differences of size and differences of age, which constitutes the most serious blemish in Williamson's writings.
As is well known, Williamson in his latest independent work corrected, as regards the Lepidodendrons, on the basis of a laborious re-investigation, the chief mistake he had made as to their process of growth[132]; he thus displayed an openness of mind worthy of a great naturalist.