26 The Plant World. 



Barnes had reflected much upon it; but perhaps this space 

 fairly represents the proportion of our actual knowledge to what 

 we know about other phenomena. 



The last chapter is named Growth and Movement. In it 

 are treated the phenomena of growth, movement, reproduction, 

 and even death, as affected by external influences upon irritable 

 protoplasm. The treatment is necessarily brief, but it is re- 

 markably clear; there is no confusion of tropisms and taxies, 

 no lack of discrimination between allied phenomena. What 

 the reader does not understand — and it is necessarily much — 

 is from the incompleteness of knowledge and not from the au- 

 thor's slovenly treatment of the subject. 



On laying the book aside one can not help feeling renewed 

 grief that our friend was not spared to follow this text-book with 

 the treatise W'hich he was, of American plant physiologists, 

 the one best fitted to write. — George J. Peirce. 



NOTES AND COMMENT. 



The hundredth anniversary of the birth of Asa Gray, which 

 occurred a few weeks ago, offers a fitting opportunity to recall 

 his distinguished work as a botanist and his greatness as a man. 

 His comprehensive kno'v^ ledge of American plants, attained 

 through daily studies extending over more than half a century, 

 added to a wide acquiantance with the plants of the world and 

 their distribution, placed him in a position, with his acute per 

 ception of generic relationship and his originality of interpreta 

 tion, to propounnd views that have ever since been fundamental 

 in plant geography. He w^as among the very first in the New 

 World to receive, cautiously at first, the doctrine of evolution, 

 which he afterward defended with the strength of well founded 

 conviction. During his active service in Harvard University 

 he taught botany, was responsible for the garden and herbarium, 

 wrote the text-books that for a generation were the guide of 

 botanical students throughout the land, and carried forward his 

 monumental work on the American flora. His well balanced 

 judgment and sense of proportion, together with his wide knowl- 

 edge, contributed to make him "a bom reviewer," and during 

 the long period in which he performed this service for the Ameri- 



