27 



THE ROLE OF STUDY OF ALGAE 

 IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF BOTANY 



Gilbert M. Smith 



Long before the founding of the Botanical Society of America fifty years 

 ago, contributions to the various phases of botany had become so numerous 

 that nobody could be familiar with the literature of the entire field. The end 

 of the time when this was no longer possible cannot be stated with certainty, 

 but broadly speaking, it may be said to have ended with the death of Sachs, 

 a man who has been called "the last of the great epitomists." In this age 

 of specialization we have reached a point where it is becoming more and more 

 difficult for a man to cover the literature past and present even in his own 

 specialty. Thus outside of their own special field of interest many botanists 

 have only a scanty knowledge of contributions from other fields of botany 

 that have advanced botanical science as a whole. In this review of progress 

 in study of algae emphasis will be placed on those contributions that are 

 general botanical significance instead of on those that are of interest only to 

 phycologists. 



Until early in the nineteenth century practically all contributions to botany 

 were in the field of taxonomy. Linnaeus' Species Plantarum (1753), the 

 official starting point for the nomenclature of plants, places 14 of the recog- 

 nized genera among the "order" algae. Today, only 4 of these genera {Con- 

 jerva, Ulva, Fucus, and Char a) are considered algal in nature. Within a few 

 decades after publication of the Species Plantarum botanists who were special- 

 ists on algae appeared on the scene. In their floristic studies of algae of various 

 regions they soon realized that there were species additional to those described 

 by Linnaeus. They described the new species that they discovered but placed 

 them in one of the four algal genera recognized by Linnaeus. This practice 

 was continued even when hundreds of species had been added to the Linnaean 

 genera. Examples of this are to be seen in Dillwyn's (1802-1809) British 

 Confervae and in Turner's (1808-1819) four- volume treatise entitled Fuci. 



471 



