104 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



or a tallow dip, also contrasts strongly with that of the present 

 gas jet and electric arc. 



The wonder should be that he saw so well, and all who follow 

 him can not but feel grateful for the path he blazed through the 

 dense forests of ignorance and the bridges he made over the streams 

 of doubt in specific distinctions. It was a noble work, but it is 

 nearly past in the older parts of our country; and while some of 

 that school should linger to readjust their genera, make new com- 

 binations of species, and attempt to satisfy the claims of priority, 

 the rank and file will largely leave systematic botany and the 

 herborizing it embraces, and betake themselves to the open fields 

 of phytoecology. It may be along the line of structural adapta- 

 tions when we will have morphological phytoecology, or the ad- 

 justment of function to the environment when there will be phys- 

 iological phytoecology. These two branches when combined to 

 elucidate problems of relationship between the plant and its sur- 

 roundings as involved in accommodation in its comprehensive sense 

 there will be phytoecology with climate, geology, geography, or 

 fossils as the leading feature, as the case may be. 



In the older botany the plant alone in itself was the subject of 

 study. The newer botany takes the plant in its siirroundings and 

 all that its relationships to other plants may suggest as the subject 

 for analysis. In the one case the plant was all and its place of 

 growth accidental, a dried specimen from any unknown habitat was 

 enough; but now the environment and the numerous lines of rela- 

 tionship that reach out from the living plant in situ are the major 

 subjects for study. The former was field botany because the field 

 contained the plant, the latter is field botany in that the plant em- 

 braces in its study all else in the field in which it. lives. The one 

 had as its leading question, What is your name and where do you 

 belong in my herbarium? while the other raises an endless list of 

 queries, of which How came you here and when? Why these 

 curious glands and this strange movement or mimicry? are but 

 average samples. Every spot of color, bend of leaf, and shape of 

 fruit raises a question. 



The collector of fifty years ago pulled up or cut off a portion 

 of his plant for a specimen, and rarely measured, weighed, and 

 counted anything about it. The phytoecologist to-day watches his 

 subject as it grows, and if removed it is for the purpose of testing 

 its vital functions under varying circumstances of moisture, heat, 

 or sunlight, and exact recording instruments are a part of the 

 equipment for the investigation. 



The underlying thought in the seashore school and the tropical 

 laboratory in botany is this of getting nearer to the haunts of the 



