5i2 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



lends itself in rhyme with picturesque and grotesque, and both these 

 adjectives fit him closely as the unique character of American botanical 

 history. So ardent was he in his desire for new descriptions, that 

 when there were no further plants within his reach, he took flight to 

 the clouds and deliberately classified the form of thunder and light- 

 ning. He published voluminously and so miscellaneously that 

 some of his papers are still coming to light. Much of his work 

 is worthless, yet there are veins of good interlarded among the bad 

 that it still remains the task of the future to sift and save. In his 

 crazy notions regarding the multiplicity of species, Kafmesque has 

 had no equals, a few weakling imitators, and only one real successor. 



While the study of the higher plants was in progress at various 

 places, there were fortunately only a few to study the lower ones. 

 Schweinitz, a Moravian minister, commenced the study of American 

 fungi first in North Carolina and afterwards at Bethlehem, Pennsyl- 

 vania. He was followed in his study in the south by another clergy- 

 man, Moses A. Curtis, who attended to the spiritual needs of his 

 parish on Sunday, and on Monday started out in his old gig for 

 mushrooms. Curtis sent most of his material to Berkeley in Eng- 

 land for description, so that the types are at Kew. Later two thirds of 

 all our new fungi were described by Ellis, whose enormous collection 

 is now in the New York Botanical Garden, and by the veteran state 

 botanist of New York, Charles H. Peck, who alone represents the 

 old school of mycologists. The lichens were early studied by Tucker- 

 man, whose collection is at Cambridge, and the mosses by Sullivant 

 and Lesquereux and later by Austin. Harvey early studied our algae, 

 and he was succeeded by Farlow in New England and by Anderson on 

 the Pacific Coast. 



Few students of the present generation are able to understand the 

 conditions that were the rule in the past. A generation ago, instead 

 of well-equipped laboratories of botany, the college boy was fortunate 

 if he could have either botany or zoology as an undergraduate elective 

 at all, and, of course, resident graduate work was practically unknown ; 

 if botany was given at all, it was only as a two-hour subject for a 

 short term when the common spring flowers were attainable, for botany 

 then was literally a study of flowers. The whole course of instruction 

 fostered by the text-books of Gray and Wood led only to a dilettante 

 sort of study which in most colleges was taken to fill in a snap elective 

 for an easy time at the close of the senior year. No one thought 

 seriously of botany ; it was a sort of fringe on the educational garment, 

 pretty enough, but only adapted to girls to be taken as an accomplish- 

 ment and classed with decorative daubery and other fancy work. 

 There were only three colleges in the entire country where there was 

 a distinctive professor of botany, and at the best of them there was not 



