These institutional facilities have since played a vital role in both 

 botanical and wood technological research, and continue to 

 serve as indispensable sources of information not only on wood 

 and its properties, but also about plant-structural adaptation 

 and evolution. Bailey, Wetmore, Record and their graduate stu- 

 dents were perhaps the most prolific and influential of the early 

 20th century American wood scientists, both through their 

 research and teaching efforts. Bailey and Wetmore are well 

 known for their pioneering research into applications of wood 

 anatomy to problems of plant evolution and classification, whe- 

 reas Record's unequalled contributions were largely to the iden- 

 tification and commercial utilization of temperate and tropical 

 woods. 



During the past century and a half, specimens of wood had 

 been accumulating in the Gray Herbarium, the Arnold Arbore- 

 tum, the Botanical Museum and the Harvard Forest. In 1940, it 

 was decided to unite all of this material with that collected in the 

 Department of Biology by Bailey and Wetmore. Initially this 

 collection was housed in the Biology Laboratories, but in 1955 it 

 was moved into the newly completed Harvard University Her- 

 baria at 22 Divinity Avenue. During the summer of 1973, the 

 wood collection was moved into a completely renovated area in 

 the basement of the Botanical Museum, adjacent to the Muse- 

 um's Paleobotanical Collections which include the extensive 

 Hankins Collection of Fossil Forests (woods). This was largely 

 the result of the efforts of Research Assistant Elisabeth Wheeler 

 and graduate student Bruce Tiffney. On January 7, 1974, the 

 President and Fellows of Harvard College approved the estab- 

 lishment of the Bailey-Wetmore Laboratory of Plant Anatomy 

 and Morphology, as the facility in which the Harvard Wood 

 Collection is housed. Professor Elso S. Barghoorn was desig- 

 nated as the Supervisor of the collection and an informal advi- 

 sory committee was formed, including representatives of the 

 several institutions involved in the development of the collection. 



Today, Harvard's Wood Collection contains over 30,000 spec- 

 imens of more than 300 woody plant families as well as some 

 35,000 microscope slides of wood and an additional 15,000 

 micro-slides of stems, leaves, flowers and pollen. These collec- 



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