180 The Plant World. 



ter and Bessey, and here and there a single worker Hke Peck 

 in New York or Yasey in Washington pursued his lonely way 

 as a special student of fungi or grasses or some other group of 

 plants. Young men were not usually encouraged to choose 

 botany as a specialty unless they had independent resources. 

 The future of the science in America was, to say the least, 

 problematical. No one could have predicted the remarkable 

 development of botany both as a pure science and in its prac- 

 tical application that has has been seen in the last third of a 

 century. 



Still the leading teachers and botanical investigators of 

 the country are not satisfied, and doubtedless this is well, 

 though one cannot help wondering what he should see if their 

 ideals were fully realized. A resolution adopted by the botan- 

 ical Society of America the Bureau of Plant Industry 

 alleges that the Bureau has suffered severe losses of scientific 

 men during recent years and calls for the Council of the Am- 

 erican Association for the Advancement of Science to investi- 

 gate and recommend such improvements as promise increased 

 efficiency; and the heart to heart talk at the Minneapolis meeting 

 of a group of veteran botanical teachers, through less lugubrious 

 than sometimes happens, recalls the words spoken by a great 

 educator to his embryo teachers ' ' Well, they will learn 

 something in spite of you." Despite all of our shortcomings 

 the botantists of America, nearly all of whom have been trained 

 in the United States, constitute such a body of men and women 

 as cannot possibly be duplicated in any other land, and their 

 work, both in teaching and in research, constitutes a chapter 

 in the history of botany that by no means justifies a pessimistic 

 outlook.— V. M. S. 



