October 20, 1916] 



SCIENCE 



557 



to the community. To a large extent it 

 means the further development and exten- 

 sion of existing facilities, added to an or- 

 ganized cooperation between botanists 

 themselves and between botanists and the 

 practical and commercial man: this will 

 include an efficient, systematic cataloguing 

 of work done and in progress. "We do not 

 propose to hand over all our best botanists 

 to the applied branches and to starve pure 

 research, but our aim should be to find a 

 useful career for an increasing number of 

 well-trained botanists and to ensure that 

 our country and empire shall make the best 

 use of the results of our research. Inci- 

 dentally there will be an increased demand 

 for the teaching botanist, for he will be 

 responsible for laying the foundations. 



Complaint has been made in the past that 

 there were not enough openings for the 

 trained botanist; but if the responsibilities 

 and opportunities of the science are real- 

 ized we may say, rather, "Truly the har- 

 vest is plentiful, but the laborers are few." 

 Botany is the alma mater of the applied 

 sciences, agriculture, horticulture, forestry, 

 and others; but the alma mater who is to 

 receive the due affection and respect of her 

 offspring must realize and live up to her 

 responsibilities. A. B. Eendle 



CHARLES SMITH PROSSER 



The " country boys " of New York state 

 never had a fair chance for a higher educa- 

 tion until Cornell University was established 

 with its state and government subsidies. The 

 early days of that institution gave adequate 

 proof of this and as the years have passed 

 the successful careers of these boys of New 

 York and Cornell have been eloquent testi- 

 mony to this aid. True for many branches of 

 human knowledge and practise, this state- 

 ment is eminently applicable to the earlier 

 graduates in the science of geology. Dr. 

 Prosser, whose sudden and unexplained death 

 on September 11 has been widely noticed in 



the press, was one of these country boys. 

 Born in 1860 in Columbus, a little hamlet of 

 Chenango County, N. Y., the son of a farmer 

 of slight substance, and grandson of one of the 

 early settlers of the region, the simple sur- 

 roundings of his boyhood were of a kind to 

 give unconscious direction to his maturing 

 life. His home lay back on the hills which 

 bound the TJnadilla River on its way south to 

 join the Susquehanna, and its outcropping 

 rocks were filled with things which, to his at- 

 tentive eye and naturally reflective mind, must 

 have awakened many questionings. A farmer's 

 boy in a stony country where fields have to be 

 picked over regularly after the spring plowing, 

 is pretty sure to either love or hate the rocks. 

 A disposing mind led this farmer's boy to 

 wish to know more about them. When the 

 country school a few miles away at Brook- 

 field could give him no more, he took the 

 helping hand which Cornell held out and 

 entered there in 1879. And it was to be his 

 fortune in after life, when fully equipped, to 

 return to his home valley and, under the 

 auspices of his state geological survey, to 

 apply his well-trained mind to the solution of 

 its geological problems. So excellently did he 

 habilitate himself in college that after his 

 graduation as bachelor of science in 1883 he 

 received the first award of the Cornell fellow- 

 ship in natural history and then for three 

 years was instructor in the department of 

 geology. . From there he went to Washington 

 as an aid to the late Lester F. Ward, in the 

 paleobotanical work of the U. S. Geological 

 Survey. It was then I first came to know him 

 while he was engaged in collecting fossil 

 plants, and then, as always afterwards, I found 

 him conscientious and earnest, though obvi- 

 ously not at that time particularly enthusiastic 

 over the work that had been allotted to him. 

 His experience as a teacher seemed to draw 

 him toward that work again and he left Wash- 

 ington in 1894, though without dissolving his 

 effective connection with the federal survey, to 

 become professor of natural history in Wash- 

 burn College, Topeka. There are active geol- 

 ogists to-day, who were his students there, but 

 the major result of his stay in Kansas is, I 



