106 Early Work in North America 



planned that it should do more than prepare advanced students 

 for work in Europe if they could go there. Every real American 

 student studied the texts and articles which came from the great 

 masters abroad. Each year during the first half of the 1880's, as 

 Farlow in the Smithsonian Reports ^' and other publishing media 

 evaluated the annual progress of botany, a "great activity in the 

 department of vegetable physiology" was observed. Only a 

 casual examination of these accounts is required to show the 

 strength of the European influence. If a year brought forth no 

 " especially striking discovery in regard to the physiology or 

 morphology of plants," the steady increase of other valuable 

 knowledge from the foreign laboratories made up for the tempo- 

 rary deficiency. So vast became the new learning that by 1883- 

 1885 some practical distinction between the " countless papers on 

 bacteria" had to be drawn: those discoveries "having a purely 

 medical bearing" and those more strictly allocated to botany. 



Bacteriology was soon to gain a foothold in several universities. 

 For example, Trelease, before he left the University of Wisconsin, 

 had ordered from abroad research equipment to develop bacteri- 

 ological study there, and from the standpoint of botanical investi- 

 gation. When the apparatus arrived, the zoologist Edward Asahel 

 Birge, as a part of the regular curriculum of the university's pre- 

 medical course, added to the fundamental studies of chemistry, 

 physics, and biology, laboratory courses in comparative anatomy, 

 embryology, and bacteriology, and a lecture course in physiology. 

 Dr. Birge himself taught bacteriology and in one of his classes 

 was a young student, Harry Luman Russell. ^^ Born at Poynette, 

 Wisconsin, in 1866, Russell was graduated from the university in 

 1888; he was to be granted his Master's degree in 1890, and, 

 aware of the importance of the new research field in bacteriology, 

 persuaded his father to send him abroad to study in Koch's labora- 

 tory. In Europe he found plant bacteriology almost totally 

 unrecognized, and so, while on the continent he completed studies 

 in animal bacteriology, he returned to the United States to prepare 

 his doctoral thesis on bacteria in relation to plant tissue. Ameri- 

 can scientists, following Burrill, led in the study of plant bacteria, 

 and for reasons. 



'^' For 1879-1880, p. 313 ; 1881, p. 391 ; 1882, p. 551 ; 18S3, p. 681. 

 "^^ Based on an unpublished manuscript (1942) hy Dean Emeritus Russell, 

 Getting started in Bacteriology, and an interview with him August 1947. 



