widely recognized. Since I have been asked to say a few words 
about our outgoing president, I take this opportunity of telling 
you about Albert F. Hill, the man, and Albert F. Hill, the 
economic botanist. I do so humbly and mindful of the great debt 
that I, as only one economic botanist, owe to him for his friendli- 
ness and help during our association in my days as a student and, 
subsequently, as a staff member at the Harvard Botanical 
Museum. 
Born 88 years ago in Dresden, Germany, of American par- 
ents, Ted was nine months old when he came to the United 
States. Before he was two, his father died, and he grew up in his 
grandparents’ home in Attleborough, Massachusetts, attending 
public schools there. Upon graduation from the Attleborough 
High School, he matriculated at Dartmouth College, majoring in 
botany, in which field he had long fostered a childhood interest. 
He earned his A.B. cum laude with departmental honours in 
botany in 1910. Dartmouth, at that time, had four great teachers 
of botany, former students of Prof. Roland Thaxter, the Harvard 
mycologist. Ted fell under the tutelage of Prof. George R. Ly- 
man, who later joined the United States Department of Agricul- 
ture in Washington and to whom Ted owed much of his later 
success. 
He thought of doing graduate work at Cornell University but 
finally took an Austin Teaching Fellowship at Harvard, at- 
tracted by another great teacher, Prof. Merritt L. Fernald, under 
whose direction he did research on the coastal flora of eastern 
Massachusetts. In 1911, he earned his A.M. at Harvard and 
became an assistant in Fernald’s course. During his last two 
years as a graduate student, he served as assistant curator of the 
New England Botanical Club Herbarium. 
In 1914, Ted went to Yale as curator of botanical collections, 
and, shortly thereafter, he began teaching field botany, followed 
later by a course in taxonomy. He also taught the course in 
elementary biology for five years at the Sheffield Scientific 
School at Yale. During this period, he was put in charge of the 
library in the Botany Department and was given the administra- 
tion of the herbarium and the teaching of Prof. Nichols’ elemen- 
tary botany course. 
It was during this time that Ted decided to finish his doctorate, 
so long delayed by teaching and administrative duties at Yale. 
Ecology was emerging as a distinct field and it appealed to him, 
although his first interests had been in plant distribution. His 
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