January 17, 1913] 



SCIENCE 



83 



Gilkinet, Suppanetz, an Austrian, Ka- 

 mienski, who recently died at Odessa, Karl 

 Lindstedt and Doelbruck, who died young. 

 I learned that I was not the first American 

 who had studied with De Bary. A short 

 time before, while he was professor at 

 Halle, an American, T. D. Biscoe, had 

 taken a course in botany, although not 

 studying botany as a specialty. The only 

 information I have in regard to Mr. Biscoe 

 is that he published a paper on the winter 

 state of our duckweeds in the American 

 Naturalist of 1873. There was only one 

 other American, a law student, at Strass- 

 burg when I arrived there, for, to the sur- 

 prise of my fellow-botanists I was not will- 

 ing to acknowledge as a fellow-countryman 

 a Chilian, whose principal occupation 

 seemed to be duelling and whose English 

 vocabulary was limited to the two words, 

 "damn Yankee." 



The general arrangements at Strassburg 

 were the same then as those of other Ger- 

 man universities at the present time, but 

 the method of working in the laboratory 

 was very different. I was given a Gliara 

 to study and in a couple of hours reported 

 that I had studied it. I was told that I 

 had not even begun. Studying, it seems, 

 meant that I must make sections through 

 the scheitel and trace the successive cell- 

 formations. But how was I to make a sec- 

 tion and what was a scheitel ? The micro- 

 tome and modern methods of imbedding 

 were then unknown to botanists and all 

 sections had to be made by hand. The 

 nearest approach to imbedding was in sec- 

 tioning small objects like pollen grains; a 

 few drops of mucilage were placed on a 

 cork, the pollen mixed with it and the 

 whole allowed to harden. Then by holding 

 the cork in one hand one could make sec- 

 tions of the pollen if one were lucky. The 

 student of the present day, when hand-sec- 

 tioning seems almost a lost art, does not 



realize what skill in sectioning could be 

 acquired by practise, but, like playing on a 

 musical instrument, constant practise was 

 needed to keep one's hand in. Modern 

 technique, which was borrowed by botanists 

 from the zoologists, has of course many ad- 

 vantages, especially in cytological work, 

 but, for certain work, hand-sectioning has 

 its advantages, as, for instance, the rapidity 

 with which sections can be made. 



If I was fortunate in my fellow students 

 at Strassburg, in one respect I was less 

 fortunate. At the time De Bary himself 

 was at work on his "Vergleichende Anat- 

 omic," which was published in 1877. 

 Anatomical studies were not his strong 

 point, but, in an unguarded moment, he 

 had promised Hofmeister that he would 

 write the volume for his series and he felt 

 in duty bound to keep his promise. "We 

 should have preferred to have had him 

 working on the mycological subjects in 

 which he excelled, but the management of 

 cell cultures and the technique required in 

 such investigations were taught to his 

 pupils. Rostafinski took his doctor's de- 

 gree while I was in Strassburg, with the 

 thesis, "Versueh eines Systems der Myce- 

 tozoen. " The monograph of that group 

 did not appear until 1875. I happened to 

 hear De Bary and Schimper talking about 

 Eostafinski's thesis, which they thought 

 was a good work, although they regretted 

 that he had made so many genera. What 

 would they say were they now living, when 

 it almost seems as if we were trying to 

 create a new genus for every species ? 



In the laboratory I noticed that the stu- 

 dents seemed to refer frequently to a book 

 of which I had never seen a copy or even 

 heard. The book was Sachs's "Lehr- 

 bueh, " second edition, 1870. I bought the 

 book and was perfectly amazed. I had 

 never dreamed that botany covered so large 

 a field. The "Lehrbuch" was an ad- 



