OBITUARY

Evening Post, Volume CXXXI, Issue 117, 20 May 1941, Page 9

OBITUARY

MR. R. M. LAING

Mr. Robert Malcolm Laing, who from 1886 until he retired in 1926 was a master at the Christchurch rsoys' High School, is dead, at the age of 76. Mr. Laing, who was born in Dunedin, graduated M.A. at Canterbury College and joined the teaching staff of the Timaru High School, irom which ac transferred to the Christchurch Boys' High School. He was president of the Philosophical Institute of Canter- . bury from 1894 to 1910 and again in 1927, and was elected a fellow of the New Zealand Institute (now the Royal Society of New Zealand) in 1922. Botany was the field in which he gained most fame, especially the botany of seaweed. The standard work on the plants of New Zealand, which he prepared in collaboration with Miss E. W. Blackwell, ran through many editions, and he conti-i----buted many papers on the botany of flowering plants and on algology to the Transactions of the New Zealand Institute: Mr. Laing, who had served as president of the New Zealand Howard League for Penal Reform, was first interested in penal reform by Miss B. E. Baughan, whom he honoured as the originator of the work in New Zealand.