Harry Marshall Ward

Harry Marshall Ward (21 March 1854 – 26 August 1906), FRS, FLS, was a British botanist, mycologist, and plant pathologist.

Born in Hereford, the eldest child of Francis and Mary Marshall Ward, Harry Ward was educated at Lincoln Cathedral school. from c. 1864. He went on to scientific studies at the South Kensington Science and Art Department under Thomas Henry Huxley in 1874. Ward then attended first Owens College, Manchester, in 1875, and subsequently Christ's College, Cambridge, from 1876 to 1879.

At Cambridge, Ward achieved a B.A. with First Class honours in the Natural Sciences Tripos. Ward's education at Cambridge was funded by a wealthy fellow student from South Kensington, Louis Lucas. He also studied with leading German botanists Julius von Sachs and Anton de Bary who at the time were way ahead of the English in the field of experimental botany.

From early 1880 until 1882, Ward was employed by the British government in Ceylon (modern Sri Lanka) to study the coffee rust disease affecting the island's coffee plantations. His detailed and methodical work established his reputation as a plant pathologist and physiologist and although he was unable to stop the rust in the coffee plantations of Ceylon he laid the foundations for solving the problem in the future.

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