142 THE AMERICAN BOTANIST 



Death of William A. Terry. — We record with regret 

 the death of William Almeron Terry which occurred at his 

 home in Bristol, Conn., on October 31, 1917. Mr. Terry was 

 born in Bristol, October 14, 1828, and was thus nearly ninety 

 years old at the time of his death. He was best known to 

 science as a student of the diatoms and allied plants though 

 he was also interested in general botany and was long a sub- 

 scriber of, and contributor to, this magazine. In his early 

 days, Mr. Terry, like so many others in his part of the world, 

 was a clock-maker. He invented a calendar clock of much 

 merit which has since been manufactured by the Ansonia Clock 

 Company. Later he was successively a melodeon tuner, a 

 photographer, and a florist. After retiring from business, Mr. 

 Terry devoted himself largely to microscopic work and his 

 untiring efforts in the study of the diatoms resulted in the dis- 

 covery of numerous new species and varieties which made his 

 name well known to scientists on both sides of the globe. 



Relation of Age to Distribution. — It needs only a 

 slight knowledge of botany to enable one to appreciate in a 

 general way the fact that the age of a species must often be 

 rather closely connected with its distribution. If there are no 

 natural barriers to the spread of a species, the wider it is spread, 

 the older it is likely to be. There are many reasons, however, 

 for assuming that the most wide-spread species are not the 

 oldest. In the first place, all plants have not equally effective 

 means for dispersal. Some are distributed by the wind, others 

 depend on the services of birds or mammals and still others 

 have adopted methods that are much slower — the osage orange 

 (Madura pomifera) for instance. Again, herbs, owing to the 

 short period required for coming to maturity and producing 

 seeds are able to spread much more rapidly than trees and also 

 to change more quickly in response to the surroundings than 

 are woody plants, and yet the trees are considered to be older 

 than the herbs ; in fact the herbs are thought to be descended 



