86 The Plant World 



something in this as fine as it is rare. Looking at the botanical 

 schools in this country, one realizes that few of them have been 

 organized on Gray's plan. He recognized that the flowerless 

 plants of America were as important as the flowering, that the 

 anatomy and physiology of plants are as significant as their 

 external morphology and their geographical distribution. He 

 associated with himself men whose chief interests were in these 

 directions, so different from his own, supplementing his and mak- 

 ing it possible to study and to teach more nearly the whole than 

 a fragment of botanical science, to study and to teach it with 

 minds centered on the common cause but approaching it from 

 different sides, not uninfluenced but controlled. Gray's great- 

 ness shows itself nowhere more planily than in this broad view 

 of the value of other kinds of botanical work than that which 

 most appealed to him and as a contributor to which he attained 

 such merited recognition. We may well hope that more heads 

 of botanical schools in this country, following his broad-minded 

 example, may wisely select their associates and then leave them 

 free to work and to grow according to their own tastes and genius, 

 and the nature of their environment. 



II. 



What is the status of our science today in this country? 

 In contrast to that concentration on exploration and descrip- 

 tion which prevailed in the first period, and on taxonomy in 

 the period which followed it, we have today a degree of differ- 

 entiation among the pursuits of American botanists which could 

 scarcely be exceeded. But as already stated, in this we are 

 following, not to say imitating, Europe. Palaeobotany has 

 long found its most congenial residence in England, pure taxo- 

 nomv at Kew, and plant-geography at Berlin, while the leaders 

 in Cytology are well distributed over central and western Europe, 

 and the phvsiologists seem fairly limited to lands of German 

 speech. Space would fail for cataloging the different brands of 

 present-dav botanists, from those who work only on the desi- 

 cated or paraffine-permeated or fossil remains of once living 

 plants, to those who breed, inoculate, and torture to learn the 

 laws of succession, health, and development; from those to whom 

 none but the microscopic or even ultra-microscopic is interesting, 



