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Friday, September 1, 1916 



CONTENTS 



The Evolution of Herbs : Dr. Edmund W. Sin- 

 nott 291 



Contributions of Chemistry to the Science and 

 Art of Medicine : Dr. L. Junius Desha. . . 298 



The School of Sygiene and Public Health at 

 the Johns Hopkins University 309 



The National Exposition of Chemical Indus- 

 tries 303 



Scientific Notes and News 304 



University and Educational News 309 



Discussion and Correspondence: — 

 Amblystoma not Ambystoma: Dr. Charles 

 P. G. Scott. Ambystoma: F. Sturges 

 Allen. The Lime Requirement of Soils: 

 P. P. Veitch. The Survival of Beat in 

 the Removed Heart of the Snapping Turtle: 

 Dr. Philip B. Hadley 309 



Quotations: — 

 Scientific Societies and the Government . . . 312 



Scientific BooTcs: — 

 Farrington on Meteorites: Dr. George P. 

 Merrill. Weld's Theory of Errors and 

 Least Squares: Professor Charles C. 

 Grove 314 



Aristotle's Echeneis not a Sucking Fish: Dr. 

 E. "W. Gudger 316 



Special Articles: — 

 Antagonism and Weber's Law: Professor 

 "W. J. V. Osterhout. Do Fungi live and 

 produce Mycelium, in the Soil? Selman 

 A. Waksman 318 



The American Chemical Society: Dr. Charles 

 L. Parsons 322 



MSS. intended for publication and boots, etc., intended for 

 review should be sent to Professor J. McKeen Cattell, Garrison- 

 On-Hudson, N. Y. 



THE EVOLUTION OF HERBS 



The most ancient system of botanical 

 classification which we know, first proposed 

 by Aristotle and Theophrastus and even 

 continued after the dawn of modern botany 

 with the herbalists of the sixteenth cen- 

 tury, divided all plants into three great 

 and easily distinguishable groups, the trees, 

 the shrubs and the herbs. As time went 

 on, however, and as botanical knowledge 

 grew more and more thorough, it became 

 evident that any system of this sort, based 

 simply on the habit of growth, not alone 

 brought together many plants unrelated in 

 almost every respect but separated others 

 which clearly resembled one another in 

 most of their characters. The old classi- 

 fication was therefore gradually abandoned 

 and in its place grew up various systems in 

 which an attempt was made to gather 

 plants into more natural groups. Finally 

 the theory of evolution, with its emphasis 

 on actual genetic relationship as the basis 

 of all sound classification, gave a great in- 

 centive to the building of hypothetical 

 family trees and lines of descent in the 

 vegetable kingdom. Almost all of these 

 have been founded mainly on a compara- 

 tive study of the various floral parts; and 

 it is therefore with such structures that 

 modern students of the morphology and 

 taxonomy of plants have for the most part 

 concerned themselves. The various types 

 of growth habit, those most evident and 

 striking of plant characters, so much em- 

 phasized by the earlier botanists, have con- 

 sequently been largely neglected as being 

 too variable and too dependant on a chang- 

 ing environment to be of much use in de- 

 termining actual relationships. 



