ACADEMY OF SCIENCES] BIOGRAPHY' 3 



Doctor Goodale was keenly alive to the need of improvement in apparatus, increase of 

 equipment, larger and better laboratories, more commodious auditoriums, and vastly increased 

 and diversified collections of illustrative material. Toward these ends he planned and worked 

 patiently for years. He early realized the importance of publicity for scientific work, and with 

 his special gift as a speaker did much by popular lectures to stir the public to interest in and 

 cordiality toward scientific work and ideals. 



He gave several courses of lectures, at the Lowell Institute in Boston, at the Cooper Union 

 in New York, and elsewhere. They were well attended and aroused enthusiasm. Vegetable 

 physiology was in the seventies, eighties, and early nineties essentially novel in America and 

 Doctor Goodale had much skill in demonstrating and explaining, even to popular audiences, 

 the leading facts and fundamental principles of this subject. He was ingenious in devising 

 effective illustrations and was one of the first to give successful lantern projection to moving 

 objects such as currents in protoplasm, the escape of oxygen during the assimilation of aquatic 

 plants, etc. Such vital processes, shown in action upon the screen, naturally attracted no small 

 interest in days when the electric lantern was still unknown and the cinema a thing undreamed of. 



Doctor Goodale was a very successful teacher in the Harvard summer school, and through 

 its medium exercised a wide influence upon the methods and ideals of many alert teachers, both 

 men and women, young and middle aged, who took back to their own work greatly increased 

 enthusiasm from a few summer weeks thus spent under his stimulating instruction. They 

 spread his fame in remote parts of the country, and others came to seek like opportunity. 



In 1879 Doctor Goodale consented, at the solicitation of Dr. Asa Gray, to undertake the 

 oversight of the Harvard Botanic Garden, and was appointed its director by the president and 

 fellows of the college. This was a task which for several reasons had much difficulty. The 

 garden was unendowed. Its expenses were constantly increasing. The rapid deterioration 

 of the then wooden-framed conservatories, the adverse influences of dust and smoke from a 

 growing city; the carelessness and occasional vandalism of visitors; the scarcity of trained 

 gardeners; the often conflicting ideas of the university boards, of botanical and horticultural 

 colleagues, as well as of the visiting public, regarding the appropriate aims for such an estabbsh- 

 ment and the lines of development it should be given; the proper adjustment of its functions 

 to instruction, research, experimentation, and acclimatization; its relations to the laboratories 

 and museums; the demands upon the available supplies of plants and flowers for decoration 

 on occasions of academic celebration — all these problems were superimposed upon the inherent 

 difficulties of keeping a host of delicate and costly exotics healthy in cramped space and un- 

 friendly climate. Doctor Gray, who had long experienced such trials, once characteristically 

 remarked that he did not wonder that Adam fell if he had to live in a garden. 



With great patience, tact, and evenness of temper Doctor Goodale discharged for many 

 years the duties of this exacting position. The garden under his directorship was kept at a 

 high level of efficiency. It functioned notably as an object lesson in the great diversity of plant 

 life. No less than 7,000 perennial species were often in cultivation there at the same time, as 

 well as a varied assortment of annuals. The conservatories were enlarged and improved. The 

 planting was given a variety of horticultural features to attract the public. Drainage and 

 grading were bettered. An endowment was started. A skilled, Kew-trained gardener was 

 secured, and a liberal policy inaugurated in supplying material not only for the diverse botanical 

 activities in the university but often to neighboring institutions as well. 



In the later seventies and early eighties Doctor Gray, relieved of his teaching by his 

 energetic younger colleagues Goodale and Farlow, and of his curatorial routine by the extraor- 

 dinarily industrious and methodical Sereno Watson, projected an ambitious collaborative 

 work which in four volumes was to summarize the science of botany. Viewed in retrospect, 

 this undertaking can be clearly seen to have involved well-nigh impossible difficulties, and 

 there can be no surprise that it remained unfinished. The first volume was a restatement of 

 external plant morphology by Doctor Gray himself. This subject was fairly concrete. It 

 had already been treated several times by Doctor Gray, whose masterly lucidity and good 

 sense of proportion had long been recognized in Europe as well as America. Furthermore the 



