WILLIAM GILSON FARLOW, 485 



with his training in Harvard College made him a sound classical 

 scholar. In after years he was fully alive to the greater breadth of 

 view and roundness of intellect given him l)y this training in the 

 humanities, as well as to the value of his Latin and Greek in giving 

 him a mastery of the force of scientific terms and names. 



It is said that his attention was first drawn to l)otany when a boy by 

 finding hepaticas in the woods near his father's place in Newton. 

 However this may be, he made such rapid progress in the science that 

 by his senior year we lower classmen spoke of him with bated breath 

 as a prodigy of botanical learning. 



This progress was largely due to the fact that in college he encount- 

 tered the first of his two great teachers — Asa Gray, who gave him a 

 solid foundation for his later professional studies; but instead of 

 embarking on these at once after his graduation in 1866, following the 

 advice of Asa Gray, he took up the study of medicine, and after 

 studying anatomy for a year under Jefl^ries Wyman — a man whose 

 casual talk was a liberal education, he entered the Harvard Medical 

 School in November, 1867, and graduated from it in 1870, securing 

 before his graduation the coveted appointment of surgical interne at 

 the Massachusetts General Hospital under that great surgeon, Henry 

 J. Bigelow; so that he took up his higher botanical studies with a much 

 more roundefl general education than falls to the lot of most scientific 

 men, the effect of which could be traced throughout his life in his un- 

 usual sanity and Ijreadth of view. 



In 1870 he began his special botanical education by serving for two 

 years as assistant to Asa Gray, whose inspiring teaching gave him a 

 comprehensive knowledge of flowering plants and made him thoroughly 

 familiar with the systematic outlook on the science, while his example 

 helped to make him a botanist in the broadest sense of the word, 

 instead of a mere specialist on the cryptogamic side. 



Even at this early day he had selected his line of work — the crypto- 

 gams — and began to study the algae in the herbarium at Cambridge 

 and also in the field at Woods Hole, where in 1871 he joined a scientific 

 party under S. F. Baird, publishing in this year his first paper " Cuban 

 Seaweeds." 



At that time there were no facilities in America for studying crypto- 

 gams, so again following the advice of Asa Gray, he decided in 1872 

 to go to Europe, where he spent the better part of two years in study 



