In a tropical country leaves supply a substratum to a little flora of their own, consisting of organisms partly algal, partly fungal, in their affinity. Ward, who had already developed his characteristic habit of never neglecting any point incidental to a research, carefully studied them, in order both to ascertain how far their presence affected the health of the leaf itself and to work out their life-history. The outcome was three important papers. One on Meliola, an obscure genus of tropical epiphyllous fungi, belonging to the Pyrenomycetes, was published in the _Philosophical Transactions_ in 1883. Bornet's classical memoir published in 1851 had been the authority on the subject. Ward was able to fill up "large gaps in the knowledge of important details." Another paper published in the _Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science_ in 1882 on an Asterina illuminates an allied organism. But the crown of all Ward's Ceylon work was the splendid memoir on a Tropical Epiphyllous Lichen which was published by the Linnean Society in 1883. In this he, I think, cleared up much that was obscure in the _Mycoidea parasitica_ described by D. D. Cunningham. Having myself communicated the paper, I shall always remember the pleasure with which I undertook in Ward's absence to give an account of it. He solved the problem with convincing completeness; he extended Schwendener's lichen theory to a group of obscure epiphyllous organisms of which he afforded, for the first time, a rational explanation. The success with which this was accomplished placed him at once in the first rank of mycological investigators. De Bary was the leading authority on Uredineae; and in 1882 Ward paid a short visit to him at Strasburg to confer with him on his coffee disease work, the accuracy of which de Bary entirely confirmed. There he made the acquaintance of Elfving and completed his Meliola paper. The outlook for Ward was now precarious. Fortunately, I found myself sitting next to Sir Henry Roscoe at a Royal Society dinner, and I suggested that Ward, as an old student of Owens College, would be a fitting recipient of a Bishop Berkeley Fellowship for original research. Principal Greenwood recorded the fact that "the very important results already achieved by Mr Ward in Ceylon, in the domain of the higher botany, led the Senate and the Council to make this appointment." In 1883, he was appointed Assistant Lecturer and Demonstrator in Botany, and, on the same testimony, "abundantly justified his election." It was a peculiar pleasure to him to relieve the veteran Professor Williamson by taking entire charge of Vegetable Physiology and Histology. His position was, in the same year, made secure by his election to a Fellowship at Christ's College, and he married the eldest daughter of the late Francis Kingdon, of Exeter, who was a connection of Clifford the mathematician.