84 The Plant World 



spect neither a surprise nor a disappointment. Michaux's, 

 Darlington's and Bartrams' gardens were research gardens, 

 particularly Michaux's, and since that time in this country 

 there have always been gardens nominally for research. Most 

 of: -them, - however, -increasing in expense if not in extent, and 

 ■lacking ^a^-; correspondingly growing income, have niaintained 

 their relation^tothe general public at the sacrifice of their more 

 scientific opportunities. ' Irt addition to the experifnental plots 

 and farms connected with Government departments, federal 

 and state, there are' now, so far as I khow^ dhly two" gardens 

 exclusively for research ^ both western, both already yielding 

 more results than could reasonably be expected because" of 

 their youth and the arid location of one of them. One wonders 

 ■if the soil or the "atmosphere" of 6ther gardens is less'fertile? 

 • iii"3:The great names in American botany are those of systema- 

 tists, the tiathes first of explorers' and then of classifiers.' With 

 scarcely more than one eminent exception, most of the men of 

 ■the past g^nei^ations gained their livelihood by other means, 

 and were botanists because of their devotiofa to the science. 

 So it was with Etiglemann, a physician of extensive and exacting 

 practice, Sullivant, Tnckerman, Short, Bartram, Darlington, 

 and, ablest of alljiTorriey;' men df' affairs, physicians, professors 

 of chemistry, of materia medica.drof natural history, by taste 

 botanists, by' necessity other things^ The one exception is our 

 most eminent man, Asa Gray. Holding a professorship of botany , 

 'the Fisher Professorship' of Natural History at Harvard, w^hich 

 Welded an income even in that day far from ample, though suf- 

 ficient 'to enable hifrl to' ddvote himself wholly' to the study of 

 plants and td thfe fcultivation of an interekt in that study among 

 our countrymen, Oray lived long enough to see botany develop 

 far beyond the nfew fields which he was the first in this country 

 to^-p^iiit out. i *r -^ .. -— i^ -^^ . ^-^^■- 



'^'^ Gmy^s life-work' Was' mVny-sided^"mucT( more so than that 

 of any other American botanist. Master of taxonomy, he was 

 the first American, and is stillalmost the only one to gain general 

 recognition foi^'the importance and value of his ideas on the geo- 

 graphical distribution of plants. Gray's essays on this subject 

 stimulated further work on the present distribution of plants, 

 and irisjiii-ed ryiieWed iriquiTv' as to tHefr condition in past geo- 



