Ward took full advantage of his opportunities at Cambridge, and attended the teaching of Sir Michael Foster in physiology and of Prof. F. M. Balfour in comparative anatomy. The sound and fundamental conceptions which he acquired from the former manifestly influenced his work throughout life. He took a first class in botany in the Natural Science Tripos in 1879. His first published paper was the result of work in the same year in the Jodrell Laboratory at Kew. In this, which was published in the _Proceedings of the Linnean Society_, he seriously criticised and corrected that of Vesque on the embryo-sac of Phanerogams. As was customary with our young botanists, Ward went to Germany for a short time, for purposes of study and to strengthen his knowledge of the language. He worked at Würzburg with Sachs, whose lectures on the physiology of plants he afterwards translated in 1887. There he continued his study of the embryo-sac in Orchideae, as Sachs subsequently testified, "zu meiner vollsten Zufriedenheit." Before the end of the year Ward was appointed on the recommendation of Kew to proceed to Ceylon for two years as Government Cryptogamist to investigate the leaf-disease in coffee. The history of this malady is almost unique in vegetable pathology. A native fungus which had eluded scientific observation, and must therefore have maintained an inconspicuous and limited existence on some native host-plant, found a wider opportunity on the Arabian coffee plant and fell upon it as a devastating scourge. It was first detected in 1869 on a single estate; in 1873 there was probably none in the island entirely free from it. Mr (since Sir Daniel) Morris had shown that the plants could be cleansed by dusting them with a mixture of sulphur and lime. But the remedy proved of no avail as the plants speedily became re-infected. Morris had been transferred to another appointment in the West Indies and Ward's duty was to take up the investigation. This he accomplished exhaustively. He showed that the fungus (_Hemileia vastatrix_) was one of the Uredineae and that infection was produced by the wind-borne uredospores. Had the planters, as in Southern India, left forest belts between their plantations, the spores might have been filtered out and the disease controlled. As it was it spread like an unchecked conflagration. Ward also discovered the teleutospores; nothing has been added to our knowledge of its life-history beyond what he obtained. The result of his investigations was given in three official reports and in papers contributed in 1882 to the Linnean Society and the _Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science_. It was no blame to him that his work led to no practical result. The mischief admitted of no remedy. The coffee-planting industry of Ceylon was destroyed and the Oriental Bank succumbed in the general ruin. Leaf disease has now extended to every coffee-growing country in the Old World from Natal to Fiji.