288 Recognition in America 



Problems of To-day," Dr. Trelease of the Missouri Botanical 

 Garden represented botany. 



Noticeable was the number of members in the Society from 

 the Division of Vegetable Physiology and Pathology. For several 

 years research in the physiology, as well as pathology, of plants 

 had been gaining. On June 21, 1895, Halsted told Galloway he 

 was " enjoying very much the growth your Division is making 

 and in particular along the physiological lines. I," Halsted said, 

 "" am getting interested in questions of soil water as related 

 to health of plants." When Smith had accepted editorship of a 

 department of vegetable physiology and pathology in the A?neri- 

 can Naturalist, Spalding in London on April 25, 1895, had written, 

 " I think you are right in feeling that one of the greatest services 

 needed at present is faithful and prompt abstracting and reporting 

 of monographs etc. where American readers can get their sub- 

 stance. I have for years thought of this as an important field 

 not properly worked in as yet." 



American students were not always pleased with the quality 

 of their European instruction. With no known exceptions, students 

 from the United States held in high esteem the laboratory and 

 classroom instruction at the Botanical Institute in Bonn under 

 Eduard Strasburger. The privilege of study under Wilhelm Pfeffer 

 at Leipzig was also highly valued. But the great German au- 

 thorities, most of them, adhered tenaciously to their traditional 

 disbelief in bacterial diseases of plants. Oskar Brefeld was one. 

 Denial of this class of diseases tempered considerably the Ameri- 

 can students' confidence in the masters of fungology. Spalding, 

 while liking Brefeld as an individual, criticised his system as too 

 simple, his scheme of relationships of the fungi as laid in con- 

 ceptions " purely anatomical, and," wrote Spalding to Smith on 

 June 1, 1895, " from all he has said in his lectures it would be 

 difficult to assume that he really comprehends what phyllogenetic 

 relationship means." Fairchild, Harper, and Spalding had 



been waiting patiently to see whether Brefeld would construct a gene- 

 ological tree and at least put on the terminal branches. This he ought to 

 be able to do if his system is what he believes it to be. But if he tried to, 

 I am afraid he would be sadly puzzled over some of those cross lines. . . . 

 Brefeld evidently knows a great deal less about the descent of fungi than 

 he thinks he does. ..." Our little systems have their day, They have their 

 day and cease to be." 



