THE FLORA OF NORTH AMERICA 513 



enough of the subject in the course to make three points for a full 

 year. Asa Gray was professor at Harvard from 1843 to 1875, and 

 during those thirty-two years, with the large undergraduate body of 

 Harvard to draw on, and with the best facilities at that time that were 

 offered in this country, only a single Harvard man of that period ever 

 became a botanist. In fact, it was not the policy of Asa Gray to 

 develop botanists; he was an ambitious man and he thought to hold 

 the higher flora of North America in his own keeping; if any people 

 attempted to do independent work, they were immediately criticized so 

 roundly that only the bravest ever dared show his hand in print again. 

 But there came a revolt. Asa Gray was, to use his own expression, 

 ' a closet botanist.' After his early days in New York he rarely went 

 afield even in the vicinity of his own home. He knew his plants only 

 as they were found in the liortus siccus. He never saw the Mississippi 

 or set foot on a prairie until he was sixty-two, and then took a single 

 hurried trip across the continent with Sir J. D. Hooker. But there 

 were others who studied afield, who knew their plants from their 

 living habits rather than from their fragmentary mummies, and one 

 or two were bold enough to make their own statements in opposition 

 to ' authority ' and to stand by them. One of these, a son of New Eng- 

 land, but broadened by residence in Illinois, Wisconsin, Colorado and 

 California, raise'd a standard against the one-man policy that had 

 obtained so long in American botany, and his work was the cause of 

 such mental strain that Gray's nervous tension could not bear it. 

 This revolutionist, stalwart and vigorous, in figure a hybrid between 

 the Farnese Hercules and the Apollo Belvedere, was Edward Lee 

 Greene, and his revolt was the signal for other and younger botanists 

 who soon followed him in the arena. After Gray's death in 1888, the 

 center of study on the North American flora shifted from Cam- 

 bridge, and new centers sprang up in Washington, at St. Louis, where 

 George Engelmann, one of our German-American botanists, had long 

 been at work, and in California, where Professor Greene then held a 

 university chair. At New York, where botany had been largely dor- 

 mant since the death of Torrey in 1873, the subject was revived under 

 the leadership of a young man whose modesty forbids my pronouncing 

 a eulogy on him living. To know how well he has developed this 

 center of botanical work one has only to visit the New York Botanical 

 Garden, at once his magnum opus and his monument. 



The period just preceding the entrance of some of the older of the 

 present generation of botanists to their college studies was a brilliant 

 one in European botany, but all foreign researches were carefully 

 hidden away from us as youngsters. All the splendid work of Hof- 

 meister, of Nageli, of Von Mohl and of De Bary was unknown to that 

 group of American college students, and the appearance of Sachs's 



VOL. LXX. — 33 



