396 The Botanical Gazette. [September, 
matters pertaining to the organism’s relation to light, heat, 
electricity and gravity, the processes of metabolism, nutri- 
tion and respiration, and the movement of water and gases in 
the plant. With rare foresight he excluded all, or nearly all, 
topics not strictly belonging within the true scope of the 
science, and presented the whole subject matter in an en- 
tirely original form, breaking away from the customs of his 
predecessors and adopting advanced scientific methods. It 
was an epoch-making book. As Strasburger has recently said 
in his history of botany in Germany, ‘‘the work at once re- 
stored vegetable physiology to its place at the centre of sci- 
entific research.” 
The book has never been translated into English, and so, 
while it stimulated the study of physiology in Germany, and 
physiological laboratories soon became common, led by the 
amous one at Wiirzburg presided over by Sachs, American 
botany felt little of the new movement until the appearance 
of Sachs’s ‘‘Text-book” in English dress a decade later. Even 
then the new science (for such it was in America) gained but 
an insecure footing. After another decade, in 1885, ap- 
of laboratory exercises given as an appendix. The year fol- 
lowing appeared Vines’s ‘‘Physiology of Plants,” in some re- 
