William Henry Lang FRS[1] FRSE FLS (12 May 1874–29 August 1960) was a British botanist and served as Barker professor of cryptogamic botany at the University of Manchester.
[3] In 1899 he travelled to Sri Lanka and Malaya to study tropical cryptogams and collect samples, returning to Britain in 1902, when he became a lecturer at the University of Glasgow; while there he worked closely with D. T. Gwynne-Vaughan and Bower, with the three of them being known as the "triumvirate".
[3] After Gwynne-Vaughan's death in 1915[4] he studied preserved plant remnants in Aberdeen, making great insights into the nature of Psilophyton, which until then had been neglected.
His proposers were Frederick Orpen Bower, Sir John Graham Kerr, Diarmid Noel Paton and George Alexander Gibson.
Lang was noted for his encouragement of women's education and influenced the botanists Irene Manton, Marjorie Lindsey, and Grace Wigglesworth.