26 THE AMERICAN BOTANIST 



munity needs not only the discoverers of new knowledge whose 

 best environment is the university, but also the interpreters of 

 knowledge whose environment is the college. Again there is 

 a great field for original study in the investigation of local 

 floras from the natural history standpoint. The construction 

 of a local flora in which the plants are not simply listed but also 

 described ecologically, while the whole subject is presented in 

 attractive literary from, would not only realize for the teacher 

 the real value of abstract investigation but it would constitute 

 a work of marked scientific value while fitting perfectly with 

 the work of teaching. — W. F. Ganong in The Teaching 

 Botanist. 



The Early Naturalists. — These men of the old school 

 were lovers of nature. They knew nature as a whole, rather 

 than as a fragment or a succession of fragments. They were 

 not made in Germany or anywhere else and their work was 

 done because they loved it, because the impulse within would 

 not let them do otherwise than work, and their training, partly 

 their own, partly responsible to their source of inspiration, 

 was made to fit their own purposes. If these men went to 

 Germany as many of them did, it was for inspiration, not for 

 direction ; not to sit through lectures, not to dig in some far- 

 off corner of knwledge, not to stand through a doctor's ex- 

 amination in a dress coat with a major and two minors, not 

 to be encouraged magna cum laude to undertake a scientific 

 career. The career was fixed by heredity and early environ- 

 ment. Nothing could head them off and they took orders 

 from no one as to what they should, or what they should not 

 reach as conclusions. They did not work for a career — many 

 of them found none — but for the love of the work. They 

 were filled with a rampant, exurberant individuality which 

 took them wherever they pleased to go. They followed no 

 set fashions in biology. Such methods as they had were their 



