1983), in the hope that it would provide information on wood 

 anatomy, which might prove valuable to botanists with diverse 

 research and teaching interests. Bailey and Wetmore displayed 

 extraordinary foresight in their belief that a study of the com- 

 parative anatomy of woody plants often helps to unravel com- 

 plex problems in the evolutionary history and phylogeny of 

 many groups of plants and thus might contribute towards classi- 

 fication of woody plants into "natural" groupings of species, 

 genera, families and orders. Fifty years later, the study of com- 

 parative anatomy maintains this fundamental relevance to di- 

 verse facets of plant biological, evolutionary and systematic 



research. 



The task of fund-raising for this effort fell largely to Wetmore, 



who received support from various sources within the Univer- 

 sity. The Department of Biology allocated space and cabinets 

 for the collections and provided funding for several years, with 

 partial support from the Arnold Arboretum and various grant- 

 ing agencies. Most of the money, however, was provided by the 

 Milton Fund. Professor Samuel J. Record of the Yale School of 

 Forestry also assisted the fledgling Harvard collection by pur- 

 chasing duplicate microslides for the wood collection which Yale 

 at that time possessed. Bailey, Wetmore and Record enjoyed a 

 long collaboration during the growth of their respective collec- 

 tions which accelerated and stimulated the development of wood 

 anatomy as a modern botanical discipline in the United States. 

 Collecting expeditions to Cuba and Panama by Wetmore and 

 several of his students further expanded the wood collection, as 

 did later expeditions to temperate and tropical regions by other 

 botanists who provided both wood and voucher herbarium spec- 

 imens for Harvard's growing collection. By 1940, the collection 

 included over 22,400 microscope slides of wood thin-sections 

 and macerations, as well as some 15,000 wood samples of more 

 than 9,000 species, 280 genera and 267 families of gymnosperms 

 (conifers/ "softwoods") and angiosperms (flowering plants/"hard- 

 woods"). As plant structural and evolutionary research pro- 

 gressed, Bailey, Wetmore, Record, and their students and 

 colleagues continued to deposit additional specimens and micro- 

 scope slides in both the Harvard and Yale wood collections. 



22 



