ACADEMY OF SCIENCES.] BIOGRAPHY 17 



to the English language be called a hole, was timely, if not pleasing." In quite another vein 

 and yet to the same point, he said (The Task of American Botanists) : "It is well to have our 

 standard high but it should not be unattainable." "We may well set before our young men 

 such models as De Bary, Sachs, Strasburger, and others; but it is just possible that a young 

 man who is determined to be a De Bary, a Sachs, a Strasburger, or nothing, may have to 

 adopt the latter alternative." "The trouble is, too many young men assume that the work 

 they are destined to do is of the highest grade and they expect to be provided with all the 

 refined apparatus and complete equipment which the leaders abroad possess." "They will 

 not begin the simplest thing without an array of reagents which would be the envy of a good 

 many chemists and the number of staining fluids which they must have around them would 

 make the rainbow blush at its own poverty." "One young man thinks that he can not do 

 any work because he has not a Jung microtome, another has been unable to do anything during 

 a vacation at the seashore because he had no osmic acid. The botanist who declares that 

 he can not do physiological work because he has not a large amount of apparatus would do 

 well to recall the case of a Mr. Charles Darwin who published something on the power of move- 

 ment in plants." His whole philosophy as to development of power rather than sponge capacity 

 may be considered as being summed up in the sentence: "You can not make a boy a good 

 mountain climber by carrying him up the Mount Washington Railway, no matter at how rapid 

 a rate; and, in ordinary life, there are many mountains to be climbed, up which there is no 

 railway." 



As a lecturer, Farlow had a manner of his own. Incisive, yet coherent, with emphasis and 

 yet not neglecting minor matters, glancing sidewards to discover the effect being made, biting 

 the ends of his mustache when he paused to allow the effect of a rhetorical question to sink 

 in. He usually began: " The subject of my lecture to-day is — by the way, are there any ques- 

 tions about the last lecture"; and when there were none, continuing, "I am pleased to see that 

 you understood it so well." He was accustomed to emphasize his points by touching the desk 

 in front of him with the outstretched forefinger of his' right hand. He was more than success- 

 ful in extracting the meat from a topic and laying it plainly before his hearers. He had a horror 

 of extraneous details, although he said they often help. His classical illustration was of ergot. 

 "Ergot," he told his class, "is a very interesting fungus. By the way, it grows about here in 

 the flowers of the wild rye on the banks of the Charles River," going on to describe its charac- 

 ters, etc. On examination, asking about ergot, he received the reply: "Ergot is a plant grow- 

 ing on the banks of Charles River." 



With advanced students and those studying for higher degrees his methods were, of 

 course, different, but he always used the question method, answer and rebuttal following. He 

 could ask the most searching questions, taking the wind completely out of the sails of the over- 

 confident and reducing superficial conclusions from a turgid condition to that of complete col- 

 lapse. He never assumed an authoritative tone himself, but always expressed a conclusion 

 tentatively and often interrogatively, unless it were negative, in which case he was often most 

 decisive. I remember well his statement as to the claims of a botanist who had distributed a 

 number of sterile specimens of a critical genus of the green algae, claiming, when remonstrated 

 with, the ability to determine such specimens, whether other botanists could or not. "One 

 may not be able to say definitely whether such sterile specimens are undoubtedly of a certain 

 species," said he, "but one can say what they are not, and the specimens distributed certainly 

 do not belong to the species whose names are on these labels." In the first work of research I 

 attempted with Farlow it was necessary to compare the structure of an alga (Tuomeya) with 

 which I was at work with that of the type specimen. As Farlow possessed only a wee frag- 

 ment of the type, I could take only one slice from it, and I was compelled to make a section of 

 my material which corresponded exactly with that slice before he would allow satisfactory 

 identity. I finally succeeded, but it cost me nearly a week's time to obtain that identical sec- 

 tion. Farlow could find more flaws and raise more objections than any other instructor with 

 whom I ever came into contact, but when he finally did approve there was the satisfaction 

 that little further destructive criticism could be directed against it. On this account, the writ- 



