486 ■ PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY. 



at Strassburg under Anton De Bary, then the first authority on fungi 

 in the world. He was very fortunate in working under two such men 

 as De Bary and Asa Gray, each a master in his own field, and these 

 lay so far apart, not only in matter, but in methods of treatment, 

 that he gained from them a remarkably broad and comprehensive 

 grasp of the science. 



It was indeed a new botanical atmosphere into which he was plunged 

 at Strassburg. Systematic botanists were spoken of scornfully as 

 "hay collectors," and with the zeal of new converts most German 

 botanists prided themselves on their ignorance of flowering plants. 

 De Bary himself was not free from this sort of narrowness, but Asa 

 Gray had impressed the importance of systematic work and flowering 

 plants so thoroughly on Farlow, that he did not allow himself to be 

 swept off his feet even by the flood of new ideas with which he was 

 continually deluged by De Bary and the eminent students he had 

 drawn about him, such as Graf Solms and Rostafinsky. 



When I heard Farlow talk with De Bary in the Strassburg labora- 

 tory I heard two naturalists discussing the question on equal terms, 

 except for the greater knowledge and experience of the older man — a 

 very striking contrast to the state of almost abject pupilage, in which 

 we chemical students were kept by our German professors. The 

 difference lay, of course, in the students, not in the professors. 



During his stay with De Bary he grew familiar with the whole field 

 of work in the morphology and development of fungi and in plant 

 anatomy, and toward the end of the time published a paper on " An 

 Asexual Growth from the Prothallus of Pteris cretica," which was 

 attacked so heartily that he returned to America with his reputation 

 made. 



Although the larger part of his time in Europe was spent with De 

 Bary, he gave shorter periods of study to lichens under J. Mueller at 

 Geneva, and to algae with Bornet and Thuret at Antibes, and travelled 

 extensively, visiting most of the celebrated botanists and herbaria. 



These years of study in Europe brought his education to an end and 

 made him, so far as is known, the only American cryptogamic botanist 

 capable at that time of doing original work himself and of teaching it 

 to advanced students. More than this, they put the finishing touch 

 to the cultivation of the qualities that made him great — his strong 

 and piercing intelligence, his phenomenal memory, the discriminating 



