40 A History of Botany, 1860-1900 



A great fungologist, Berkeley, died in 1889. He was 

 mainly a systematist for most of his time, but he con- 

 tributed to other fields of study. It is to him that we owe 

 the first complete account of the Peronosporeae, published 

 in 1846, in which he anticipated De Bary by about fifteen 

 years. He was a prolific writer in various journals, chiefly 

 upon fungi. 



America lost her greatest botanist of the time in 1888, 

 when Asa Gray passed away. It is to him that we trace 

 our knowledge of the flora of the northern continent, which 

 he knew from the Arctic Islands to Mexico, and from the 

 Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. His chief earlier works were 

 the Synoptical Flora and the Manual of Botany of the 

 Northern States. He projected a larger work, the Genera 

 Florae Boreali- Americana Orientalis, but only two volumes 

 of it appeared. Gray's most original contribution to science 

 took the form of a Memoir of the Flora of Japan, in which 

 he compared the vegetation of Japan with that characteris- 

 ing the eastern and the western regions of America, and 

 those with one another, and the whole with the tertiary 

 flora, so that he sketched the history of the vegetation of 

 the north temperate hemisphere in relation to its geo- 

 graphy, from the cretaceous period to the present time. 

 In his teaching Gray was an ardent supporter of Darwin's 

 views, which he helped materially to spread in America. 



