Notes and Comment, 179 



upon the rate of water loss in such halophytes. — Burton E. 

 Livingston. 



NOTES AND COMMENT. 



The report of the fifth annual meeting of the Botanical 

 Society of America contains a list of members and associates 

 from which it appears that the society now has 98 members 

 and 62 associates members, the latter presumably being condi- 

 tionally eligible for full membership. These combined lists 

 include the names of more than 75 professors, associate and 

 assistant professors of botany (including a very few in forestry 

 and plant pathology) ; the remaining names, approximately 

 85 in number, are of investigators, directors of laboratories, 

 and others, practically all of whom are now or have been until 

 recentlv actively engaged in botanical work. The constitu- 

 tion of the Society provides that "Candidates for membership 

 must be actively identified with botanical work, and umst 

 show special abilitv in original research, as indicated by published 

 papers or merit. 



A single generation ago a society of this character and of 

 such requirements for membership, if it could have been or- 

 ganized at all in the United States, would hardly have had a 

 dozen members. In the late seventies very few institutions 

 in the countrv made any attempt to maintain a botanical de- 

 partment. Harvard was the best equipped, and while 

 Dr. Grav, relieved of teaching, was devoting himself to the 

 herbarium and the Flora, his assistant professors, Drs. Farlow 

 and Goodale, were offering almost the first and only opportu- 

 nitv in plant physiology and cryptogamic botany that has 

 been known in America. At Yale Professor Eaton set his stud- 

 ents to working on mosses, while he worked on his fern books 

 and buill up his fine herbarium. Cornell had organized a more 

 comprehensive course of botantical instruction with Professor 

 Prentiss at its head, and in Michigan Professor Beal at the 

 Agricultural College was training students in his own unique 

 way and collecting material for his book on grasses. Other 

 lights were rising here and there — among others Britton, Coul- 



