The son of Thomas Bilsland Lang, a medical practitioner, and his wife Emily Smith, he was born in
Groombridge in
Sussex on 12 May 1874. Lang was educated at
Dennistoun Public School in Glasgow before being accepted into the
University of Glasgow, where he graduated with a
BSc (Hons) in
botany and
zoology in 1894. He qualified for medicine in 1895 but never became a practising doctor; thanks to his own enthusiasm and the encouragement of his teacher
Frederick Orpen Bower he instead became a professional botanist. His first research was on the structure of ferns, something Bower was apparently an authority on, and Lang soon followed him in that regard. He moved to study at the Jodrell Laboratory on a Robert Donaldson scholarship in 1895, where he focused on the
apomixis of ferns, and discovered a
sporangium on the
prothallus of a fern at a time when biologists were exploring alternate means of reproduction in plants. he studied preserved plant remnants in Aberdeen, making great insights into the nature of
Psilophyton, which until then had been neglected. In 1911 he was made a
Fellow of the Royal Society In 1926 he was elected a Fellow of the
Royal Society of Edinburgh. His proposers were
Frederick Orpen Bower, Sir
John Graham Kerr,
Diarmid Noel Paton and
George Alexander Gibson. He won the Society's
Neill Prize for the period 1915-1917. In 1932 he received an honorary doctorate (LLD) from the University of Glasgow, followed by a second honorary doctorate from
Manchester University in 1942. He was also a foreign member of the
Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Lang was noted for his encouragement of women's education and influenced the botanists
Irene Manton,
Marjorie Lindsey, and
Grace Wigglesworth. After his retirement he moved to
Westmorland. His wife died in 1959 following a period of ill-health, and he followed barely a year later at his home in
Milnthorpe on 29 August 1960. ==Family==