THE FLORA OF NORTH AMERICA 497 



THE PROGRESS OF OUR KNOWLEDGE OF THE FLORA OF 



NORTH AMERICA 



By Professor LUCIEN MARCUS UNDERWOOD 



COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 



WHATEVER may be the avenue of approach to the subject of 

 botany as a science, whether we work out the details of the 

 development, maturation and division of the elements within the 

 single cell, or seek to trace the race history through the detailed de- 

 velopment of a single organism from egg to egg again, or whether we 

 approach it through either the mutations or the variations of a single 

 species, the last problem of investigation as well as the first will bear 

 directly on the question : What are the relations of plants to each other 

 in the natural system of classification? In this broader sense all 

 botanists, whether they are only cytologists, whether they deal with the 

 fascinating problems of embryological development, whether they are 

 field ecologists, or finally whether they are just botanists pure and 

 simple, because they love the things of nature and can not help being 

 botanists if they are anything at all — all these are systematic botan- 

 ists, even though some of them appear to others as unsystematic, when 

 their wilder flights into the realm of the imagination cause them to 

 become mere theorists with no stable foundation in real facts. 



So multifarious have become the problems that have entered into 

 the study of botany in these latter days, that it is sometimes difficult for 

 a layman, brought up in the ancient conception of botany as the mere 

 study of flowers, to understand the breadth of scientific training in- 

 volved in the development of a modern botanist; in fact, it is often 

 a difficult problem for specialized botanists themselves to understand 

 all the bearings of the highly specialized work of some of their fellows, 

 and the research student of to-day soon finds himself pushing out 

 into ground still unbroken, which his predecessors may have had 

 glimpses of from afar, but never really entered to occupy and cause it to 

 yield its fruits. I am speaking here of real students, not of those sutlers 

 and train followers that swarm about the rear of every respectable army, 

 and often try to pass themselves off for the real rank and file. Of that 

 large array who pursue botany as far as light comedy, because somebody 

 wrote ' How to know the dandelions in their lair ' and roll such polysyl- 

 lables as Taraxacum and Leontopodium glibly from their tongues in 

 order to impress the unwitting citizen of their accomplishments, we have 



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