RELATION TO HIS TIMES 191 



found. In this connection his figuring young plants of Equisetum 

 attached to prothalli is interesting. In some speculations con- 

 cerning the embryology of Loranthus he came, by a wrong 

 line of approach, within touch of the right comparison, when 

 he compares the endosperm to the confervoid green growth 

 (i.e. the prothallus) at the base of the young plant of Equisetum. 



It is idle to speculate on what might have happened had 

 such a wide observer as Griffith chanced on the clue. In this 

 respect he was of his time as most are. The man who put the 

 industrious but blind gropings of this period in morphological 

 botany straight, both as regards the development of the embryo 

 and the comparative ontogeny of archegoniate plants was Hof- 

 meister, and like all exceptional men he belonged to the new 

 period created by him. 



The great advantage of this course of lectures seems to me 

 to be that it approaches the study of the history of botany in 

 the right way ; for progress in our science has been the result 

 of individuals rather than of schools. The consideration of the 

 work of Griffith from 1832 to 1845 is a vivid illustration of the 

 condition of morphological botany in the earlier portion of the 

 period, surveyed in one of the chapters in Sach's History under 

 the title of " Morphology and Systematic Botany under the 

 influence of the History of Development and the knowledge of 

 the Cryptogams." These two subjects were always before 

 Griffith. 



The interest of the personality of William Griffith and of 

 the work he accomplished in his tragically short life is obvious. 

 Not less so is the way in which that work was done inside the 

 limitations of his period. We, who are still gleaners in the field 

 that Griffith and his contemporaries cleared and Hofmeister 

 marked out and tilled, are probably just as incapable of con- 

 ceiving the future developments of morphology. 



