146 CONTRIBUTIONS TO WESTERN BOTANY 
Mother decided to sell the old mill and move to Iowa some five miles 
east of Grinnell on the pristine prairie; and here I grew up from my 
early teens on the wonderful prairie. Everywhere were flowers in the 
spring and summer time, all of them strange except those growing in 
the natural grove a mile east of us. The niggerheads (Heliopsis and 
Eryngium) we used to flip off with our whips as we drove along. There 
were sunflowers, rattlesnake weeds with prickly heads (Eryngium), the 
compass plant (Silphium) whose leaves pointed north and south, the 
blazing button rods (Liatris) of different kinds. In the sloughs (wet 
places) we used to find many asters and gentians. Then there was the 
prairie apple (Astragalus crassicarpus), and in the thickets the lady’s 
slipper (Cypripedium), Habenaria, Spiranthes, etc. 
To get an education was part of Mother’s religion; so, of course, 
I went to college, walking five miles back and forth. In the worst 
weather I boarded myself in town. Grinnell was a small college with 
half a dozen devoted professors, mostly ministers. Some of them were 
great men (such as Dr. Magoun and Prof. Macy), but none of them 
looked upon science as anything but an educational freak. Education 
meant proficiency in literature, languages, and religion. I became pro- 
ficient in Latin and Greek and studied Sanskrit. I also knew some 
French and German. All this time my recreation was with wild flow- 
ers. My:mother was always spurring me on to know more about them. 
I never thought it any work to study flowers; it was just a part of my 
life. There was no one else at college who knew as much about them as é 
The only botany text-book I knew was written by Mrs. Lincoln, 
who used the system of Linnaeus and who tried to describe the flowers 
of the middle United States. The descriptions were brief and inade- 
quate, and the genera were arranged not in families but in the order of 
their stamens and pistils. Everywhere were such names as Syngynesia, 
pentandra, tetrandria, polyandria, etc. For some years, with the help of 
specimen of Asplenium ruta-muraria from the Colosseum. She was a 
lover of flowers but had no training in botany and never did really ident- 
ify a dozen plants by analysis. So it was up to each student to get the 
names the best way he could. There was always a conflict of authority 
as to what was the real name for a plant. 
Thomas T. Baker and A. O. Hart, who had graduated the year be- 
ore me, were really trying to name our Iowa flowers. Both of them 
had considerable skill, and were very helpful to us when Miss Ellis got 
