DURING THE LAST HALF CENTURY. 129 



Gray has given us in the text-book of structural botany 

 an almost perfect work, while translations of Sach's great 

 volume are in most libraries, and, besides, almost every 

 mail brings to our table magazines devoted specially to 

 botanical research, filled with the latest information from 

 every quarter of the globe. In short, the study of bot- 

 any from being looked upon as merely including the col- 

 lecting and naming of plants, has been shown to be of a 

 widely different nature in its highest aims ; the study of 

 the life-history of the individual and its relations to other 

 forms. No longer do we draw an impassable line be- 

 tween the flowering plants and cryptogams ; recent study 

 proves that no such line exists. Instead of a mass of 

 disconnected members we are taught to see a graduated 

 line reaching from the humblest one-celled alga to the 

 loftiest and most highly developed monarch of the forest. 



And what then are the visible results in Essex County 

 of this fifty years of labor? 



The nucleus of the herbarium begun by Oakes and 

 Nichols has grown into a collection including some 4,000 

 sheets of mounted plants and 200 wood specimens, repre- 

 senting nearly 1,700 species of plants, native or natural- 

 ized in Essex County, besides a reference collection of 

 about 10,000 specimens from all parts of the world, all 

 of which is now neatly arranged and properly cared for 

 by the Peabody Academy of Science, at whose rooms it 

 is open for free consultation by any botanist in the county. 

 With this collection are the latest botanical reference 

 books and microscopes for the use of students. Lectures 

 and instruction in botany have formed part of the regular 

 work of the Academy, where classes have regularly been 

 conducted for several years. At the evening meetings of 

 the Essex Institute many papers of value on this subject 

 have been presented, while the influence of the two him- 



