92 Early Work in North America 



since that was the only way of getting into any part of a natural history 

 career. . . . When I began to study, [he said], there were few persons 

 who pretended to study botany at all but most of them were well trained 

 as far as training went in those days. There were few inducements to 

 study botany beyond the natural desire of those naturally interested in the 

 subject. . . . The death of Horace Mann Jr. just as I took my M. D. made 

 it possible for me to begin as an assistant in botany. 



Farlow secured his appointment at the Gray Herbarium soon 

 after graduating from the medical school and continued in that 

 position for two years. As an undergraduate he had been taught 

 by Gray in the regular required sophomore course; and in his 

 junior year he had been one of several students who requested 

 special advanced instruction in systematic botany. During his 

 senior year he had been one of two voluntary workers at the Gray 

 Herbarium." He doubtless acquired from Gray an extensive 

 knowledge of the flowering plants and vascular cryptogams, in- 

 cluding marine algae of which there was a considerable collection 

 at the Herbarium. His summer of 1871 was spent at Woods Hole, 

 Massachusetts, with a corps of naturalists under Spencer F. Baird 

 of the United States Fish Commission. Gray, overburdened with 

 the work of his and John Torrey's Flora of North America, 

 planned to make Farlow the curator of the Herbarium, and Farlow 

 did some work arranging the thallophytes of the Herbarium. But 

 in June 1872 he, as America's first real botanical student to seek 

 advanced study under DeBary, began a tour of England and conti- 

 nental Europe which during two years would include travels in the 

 Scandinavian countries, Russia, Switzerland, France, and Ger- 

 many. At DeBary' s laboratory at Strassburg he received instruc- 

 tion in " the management of cell cultures and the techniques 

 required " in studies in mycology, and of the anatomy of vege- 

 tative organs of the flowering plants and ferns. Six years earlier 

 DeBary had published his work on the morphology and physi- 

 ology of the fungi, lichens, and myxomycetes, and he was now at 

 work on his Verglekhende Anatomie der V e get ationsor gane der 

 Phanerogamen und Fame (1877). While in his laboratory, 

 Farlow studied and described the first known case of apogamy in 

 ferns. He also read the 1870, or second German, edition of 

 Sachs's Lebrbuch der Botanik. 



* W. G. Farlow, The change from the old to the new botany in the United States, 

 Science, n. s. 37 (942): 82-83, Jan. 17, 1913. 



