12 PREFACE 



It has seemed to me desirable that, in the tracing of these outlines 

 of botanical history some prominence ought to be given to biography. 

 The reader or the student of a book can never take the deepest 

 possible interest in it so long as its author is unknown to him, or, 

 as it might be said, known by name only; though that is but an 

 empty phrase; for to know a person by name only is not to know 

 him at all. A fair knowledge of the whole career, early and late, 

 of the author of a literary or scientific masterpiece not only in- 

 tensifies, as I said, one's interest in the work, but is most helpful 

 to the understanding of it, if not indispensable to the full compre- 

 hension of it. To this natural and reasonable demand on the part of 

 those who would like to learn something of the history of botany, 

 the historians have not well responded. In most cases they give 

 in a single paragraph, or even in a short foot-note, the year of a 

 man's birth, that of his demise, perhaps the name of the institution 

 whence he had his degree, and of those in which he occupied a 

 professor's chair, and so ends the biography of a man who may have 

 been a genius and the creator of an epoch in science ; mere epitaphic 

 statements, which seem only to bury more deeply out of sight the 

 once living and active personality, and to relegate his very name to 

 a still remoter place in the region of myth and shadow. There are 

 probably few botanists of this twentieth century who have the most 

 vague conception of what a single one of the earlier master builders 

 of our science was like in his personality and character. To most of 

 us they are too nearly mythical, and mayhap less livingly pictured 

 in our minds than are some of those really mythological personages 

 that men believed in four thousand years ago. It will be seen that 

 in these studies of the landmarks, I give some prominence to the 

 biographic aspect of botanical history. This has been done at 

 great expenditure of time and thought ; but I have felt that the end 

 was an extremely desirable one ; and I have lit*tle or no doubt that 

 these sketches of the lives of great promoters of our science who 

 lived in other centuries will be received by many as among the most 

 welcome and instructive of my paragraphs. 



United States National Museum. 



Washington, D.C. 



2 July, 1907. 



