52 THE AMERICAN MIDLAND NATURALIST 
Dr. Asa Grey’s work, which was the first preeminently botanical ap- 
proach in America gave a fresh and added impulse to the sort of 
study which many earlier naturalists had started. This was the 
time when the sciences were giving rise to many branches hereto- 
fore never separated from biology. Ornithology was the first of 
these to develop as a separate study. Botany came next, but not 
until quite a bit later. Botanical literature of a popular nature 
records this break from biology in the very last years of the nine- 
teenth century, The next sudy was entomology, but of that there is, 
so far as I know, no popular literature, as yet, because it is so young, 
and certainly there is none in this country which has literary value. 
Fabre did for the insects, in France, what paroue has done, ina 
way, for birds, in our country. 
1900 was the time of the organization of many movements but 
one of the most interesting of these was the tendency which arose 
for the formation of naturalist organizations. The Wild Flower 
Preservation Saciety of America is one of the earliest which devoted 
itself to plants. From 1900 on there haye been hundreds of such 
societies, many of them of strictly local nature which have sprung 
up within our country. And it is to these societies and their work 
that the periodical naturalistic literature is indebted for its support. 
Any change in attitude of these organizations is reflected in their 
literature. The change was first economic and everything in the 
out-of-doors was translated into money value. Now I think that 
we are less commercial in our dealings with nature, but we are not 
entirely back to the old aesthetic appreciation. We are trying to 
strike a median between the two. And of this sort of median litera- 
ture I shall next speak. The ‘“‘American Botanist,’’ a monthly, 
claimed in its first number which was published by W. N. Clute 
and Co., in 1901 to be ‘‘Devoted to economic and ecological 
botany.’ Mr. Clute is still the editor of this publication, and has 
maintained for it, throughout its period of nineteen years, a steady, 
even, well trained influence. It is not scientific in the sense that 
it abounds in technical terms or explores scientific problems to their 
very depths. Neither is it popular to the extent of lacking precise, 
definite information. It seems to me to have struck the between 
note which we would wish might be struck by more periodicals. 
There is an increasing demand for just such leisurely excursions 
into such fields as this magazine suggests. The nature-study clubs 
have bred up a large number of individuals who enjoy an excursion 
