Floi-it of Miihigjii. Study at MirmcAN 7 



some boys" wonder book that coffee berries, said to be proverbially 

 slow to i^erminate, mii;ht be germinated overnight by throwing 

 them into strong ammonia water. [He] bought some ammonia 

 with [his] pocket money, tried it, and found it to be as stated, but 

 [he] held no checks." Fifty years later, while studying ammonia 

 or salts of ammonia as a possible determining factor in the growth 

 of tumors in plants, he repeated these experiments and this time 

 held controls. He connected the work of his adult years with the 

 discoveries of his youth thus: 



I have extended the experiment also to date seeds and to some others 

 known to be hard to germinate — that is, black-locust seeds, but only with 

 doubtful results,- and even in the case of coffee seeds some germinate 

 promptly in distilled water, so that, curiously enough, the experiment 

 which more than any other determined the trend of these researches would 

 have had no influence on my thinking had it been made in the first place 

 properly — that is, with a sufficient number of controls in pure water. 



While midway in his 'teens, Erwin began to study ceils of 

 plants and plant life under the microscope. On January 5, 1870, 

 he wrote in his diary: "I studied cell life some tonight. [U]sed 

 Craig's microscope (100 diameters) . [S]aw the cells in two house 

 plants, moss and cacti . . . ." He drew plates of what he saw. 

 In the pith of elder he observed "six sided cells very plain" 

 and compared these with the skin of human hands. Microscopes 

 were rarities in those years, especially in rural America, and he 

 longed for one of powers strong enough to carry his anatomical 

 comparisons further. He was reading a text on anatomy and 

 physiology, and from the "Chemical News Am[erican] Reprint" 

 of November, 1867, he had copied a formula for preserving ana- 

 tomical specimens. 



He was an amateur botanist as w^ell as a student of human 

 physiology; and amateur botanists, interested in cellular physi- 

 ology, were as rare as professional botanists whose work extended 

 beyond taxonomic classification of plants. Most botanists, ama- 

 teur and professional, were natural historians, and very few in 

 America were genuinely interested in plant physiolog)'. 



Many of Erwin's amateur research ventures served practical 

 purposes, of immediate use, such as the preparation of variously 

 colored inks, medicinal prescriptions, glues, salves, stain removers, 

 cements for leather and gas pipes, and metal coatings. Of course, 

 his investigations required a knowledge of the few known basic 



