The British botanist Sir Arthur George Tansley was active throughout the first half of the 20th century. He received a degree in natural sciences from Cambridge in 1894, and in 1907 was appointed University Lecturer in Botany there, having been employed between 1893 and 1907 as Assistant Professor of Botany at University College, London. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1915. In 1923 he resigned his Cambridge lectureship and moved to Vienna to study psychology under Freud. He returned to England in 1924, dividing his attention between botany and psychology until 1927 when he fulfilled a prophecy of Freud's and returned to his ‘mother subject,’ by accepting the Sheridan Chair of Botany at Oxford. He resigned from this post in 1937, having reached retirement age, and was appointed Professor Emeritus. Following this he served on several important government committees dealing with issues of environmental conservation, and was knighted in 1950. He continued to write in botany...