American Botany. 85 



logic times. These two more or less divergent lines have led, 

 on the one hand, to repeated attempts to write the geological 

 history of plants on this continent, and on the other, to that 

 undisciplined discipline calling itself ecology. His own en- 

 deavors were applied most earnestly to the study of the flowering 

 plants, but he, unlike many of his less broad-minded contem- 

 poraries, was not blind to the need of studying the so-called 

 lower forms. He early associated with himself men to whom 

 the crvptogams appealed most strongly. Thus a school of 

 botany was begun, a school to this day with the taxonomic idea 

 preponderant, as for that matter it still is in most of the other 

 botanical schools of this country. The quest for new species is 

 still so frequentlv stimulated by success that it invariablv ac- 

 companies the attempt to arrange our plants in classifications 

 more or less reasonable and convenient. 



In addition to Gray's great contributions to botanical sci- 

 ence, both as classifier and as plant-geographer, we should recog- 

 nize his records of the personal history of our science in the last 

 centurv. His obituary notices and biographical sketches ap- 

 pearing in various periodicals, but especiallv in the successive 

 volumes of the American fournal of Science, give in graceful 

 and unusuallv gracious language the main facts and a personal 

 estimate of the lives and the significance of his contemporaries, 

 thus furnishing the data from which each of us may formidate 

 his own historv of botanv. 



Agassiz was preeminently a teacher bv jiersonal contact, 

 and .American zoology has been profoundly influenced bv him 

 through those whose zeal he enduringly inflamed. In striking 

 contrast to this great teacher by the spoken word was Gray, 

 teacher bv his books. How many of us would be botanists 

 now if Grav's textbooks had not lieen written^ These books 

 opened fields far wider than those they cultivated, and to many 

 these opened and untilled fields became the possession and the 

 inspiration of a lifetime. The textbooks of today are diff"erent 

 from Gray's, and the ])roportions of contemporary botanv are 

 quite different from those of his lifetime. There has been, per- 

 haps, a greater departure from Gray's botany than from the 

 zoology of Agassiz in the years since they died. But Grav was 

 an inspiring and in no degree a dominating teacher. There is 



