1887. | BOTANICAL GAZETTE: 275 
EDITORIAL. 
It 1s customary to speak of the botanical work constantly issuing 
from the German laboratories as representing the highest attainment in 
botanical activity and accuracy. In a contrast with German botanists, 
American workers are placed in an inferior position in the estimation of 
the botanical world. The first statement is undoubtedly trie, while the 
second is no discredit to American botanists, as we desire to show. Bo- 
tanical activity and botanical ability were never greater in this country 
than at the present writing. The older botanists add to long lives filled 
with most enduring work an abiding zeal that associates them with the 
youngest workers, while an abundance of strong new blood gives promise 
of a most vigorous development. It is no lack of ability among Ameri- 
can botanists that ranks them below their transatlantic brethren, but lack 
be considered the necessary foundation for every botanical position 
from which original investigation is expected. In fact, the -investi- 
gator, with his lecture room and laboratories should be considered as a 
part of the equipment of a botanical garden. It seems to us that this is 
the imperative need of American botany. It need.hardly be said that 
such an equipment includes the element of time which will make inves- 
tigation the chief thing and teaching incidental. Our appeal, then, is for 
friends of American botany to establish botanical gardens, and . endow 
them that they will not only become seats of botanical investigation, but 
also inciting causes of similar institutions every where. 
.A CORRESPONDENT of Science asks if the trumpet-creeper 18 polson- 
ous. Such a query might be raised about many plants generally regarded 
as innocuous. Rhus poisoning is taken as the standard of comparison, 
‘In which the virulent effluence is potent enough to affect specially sus- 
ceptible persons through considerable distance, and a far larger east 
be ted and harmless plants 
a 
