6 WILLIAM GILSON FARLOW— SETCHELL [Meuoirs [vo™xi; 



kind and indications of his activity in connection with the worK laid out for the Bussey 

 Institution and the Massachusetts Society for the Promotion of Agriculture, the latter furnishing 

 the plates for Farlow's articles. 



During his connection with the Bussey Institution, Farlow also gave instruction in crypto- 

 gamic botany at Cambridge two days a week, in a primitive laboratory in Lawrence Hall, and 

 also summer-school instruction at Cambridge and in the marine alga? at Woods Hole, Mass., 

 in what he calls an "improvised laboratory." He had certain advanced students, the first 

 of whom, Byron D. Halsted, later professor of botany at Rutgers College and botanist of the 

 New Jersey Experiment Station, took for his thesis subject: "A classification and description 

 of the American species of Characese" (Boston Soc. Nat. Hist., Proc, vol. 20, pp. 169-190, 

 March, 1879). 



In 1879, as he tells us (1896, p. 2), the diminished income from the Bussey funds caused a 

 suspension of his instruction at the institution and he was transferred to Cambridge, with the 

 appointment to a professorship of cryptogamic botany, the first recognition of the equal standing 

 of the lower plants with the higher, "cryptogamic" being adopted as a portion of his title, 

 "in order," to quote his own words (1896, p. 9), "to point out the existence of this branch 

 of botany as a proper field for study in this country." Farlow was now 35 years old and had 

 established firmly cryptogamic botany as a worthy branch of university instruction and at- 

 tention. He was free to devote himself to the building up of his own branch of botany as Asa 

 Gray had in his time, and from even less beginnings, built up his wonderful structure and equip- 

 ment of phsenogamic botany. A room was assigned for laboratory and herbarium in the build- 

 ing of the Lawrence Scientific School, whence it was removed to the attic of Boylston Hall, 

 later to the lower floor of the east wing of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, then to the 

 third floor of the Agassiz addition to that building, and finally to the upper floor of the central 

 or botanical section of the museum building, where it met other divisions of botanical in- 

 struction. The botanical establishments at Harvard University have always been scattered 

 and are scattered even at the present day, but during the last years of Farlow's life, economic 

 botany, histology, and physiology were housed in the same building with cryptogamic botany, 

 while the Gray Herbarium and the Arnold Arboretum were more or less distant from them. 

 The period in Farlow's life extending from 1879 to 1896 represents the time of his active teaching 

 of larger as well as of smaller classes and of graduate students. Among his earlier advanced 

 students and assistants of this time was William Trelease, and somewhat later Roland Thaxter, 

 the former soon becoming immersed in work on the morphology and taxonomy of the higher 

 plants, particularly after becoming the first director of the Missouri Botanical Garden, and the 

 latter continuing on with the fungi and becoming Farlow's successor, to carry on the work 

 of placing the great Farlow Herbarium and Library on a permanent basis for growth and 

 influence. 



About the year 1885 there came into Farlow's laboratories George Howard Parker, Benja- 

 min Lincoln Robinson, Robert Paine Bigelow, William McMichael Woodworth, and James 

 Ellis Humphreys, who brought with them a true biological spirit and introduced some in- 

 novations in botanical methods. Some of this group brought with them from the zoological 

 laboratories the method of embedding in paraffin, and used this technique in their cryptogamic 

 research, probably the first application of this method in any botanical laboratory. About 

 1887, A. B. Seymour was appointed assistant to Farlow and began his long association with 

 the cryptogamic herbarium and preparation of indices of species and host plants of North 

 American fungi. In the fall of 1887, began my own four years of connection with the crypto- 

 gamic laboratories, first as Morgan fellow and later as assistant in biology, and with me, in the 

 laboratory, besides Seymour as assistant, were Kingo Miyabe and W. C. Sturgis. From this 

 time on the cryptogamic laboratories became the shrine toward which the pilgrimages of the 

 cryptogamic students of the United States and Canada were directed. There may be mentioned 

 H. M. Richards, G. J. Peirce, C. L. Mix, T. W. Galloway, L. M. Underwood, E. A. Burt, R. A. 

 Harper, B. M. Duggar, Hermann Schrenck, George T. Moore, and others, most of whom 

 finished up one or more short papers with Farlow or began research work to be reported on later. 



