1895.) Development of Vegetable Physiology. 385 
high place in the estimation of botanical teachers. These 
works possessed a specially potent element of virility in be- 
ing the expression of knowledge at first hand, the words of 
the master. In so far as inspiration was drawn from foreign 
sources it came chiefly from French and English scholars, of 
whom De Candolle the eldest and Robert Brown were the 
representatives. 
A half century ago vegetable physiology, in the fulness of 
the modern meaning of the words, did not exist. Structural 
botany was then the dominant phase, and in elementary 
instruction took the shape of close attention to the form and 
arrangement of the organs of flowering plants, with the ul- 
terior object of being able readily to determine the names of 
the plants of the field. Even then physiology presented some 
attractive features, but they appeared largely extra-territorial, 
as the title of the book from which most of us received our 
early botanical pabulum testifies: ‘‘First Lessons in Botany 
and Vegetable Physiology,” by Asa Gray, issued in 1857, and 
continuing its supremacy as a text-book until 1887, when it 
was revised and renamed. 
In the seventies botanical laboratories began to form a 
necessary feature of the best institutions, each with its quota 
of compound microscopes and reagents, in which we followed 
the example of Germany, such laboratories having been es- 
tablished at Halle, Breslau, Munichand Jena a decade pre- 
vious, and subsequently at many other centres of learning. 
With the advent of Sachs’s ‘‘Text-book of Botany” in English 
dress about this time, the science in America took ona new 
and vigorous phase of development. The method of this 
work found more convenient expression in Bessey’s ‘‘Botany” 
(1880), which for a decade was the recognized standard of 
instruction. A wealth of laboratory guides soon appeared, 
and American botanists became devotees of microscopic an- 
atomy. I scarcely need call your attention to the triumphal 
advancement of botany during the decade of the eighties, it 
is so fresh in every one’s mind. It amounted toa revolution; 
the work of the herbarium was wellnigh abandoned for the 
study of the cell. Those of the older systematic botanists 
who took no part in this upheaval became alarmed, and put 
