187 
flora of South Carolina and Georgia which challenges our admi- 
ration. 
We now come to a new era in the development of American 
botany. Hitherto most American botanists had been interested 
in other natural sciences as well, and in so far as they had devoted 
their attention to botany they had covered essentially the same 
ground. Morphology and physiolugy were still in the back- 
ground, but — taxonomy held the field, specialization was 
the order of the day. 
The meee leader of een botany during this 
period was Dr. Asa Gray. At first i w York, and later for 
many years at Harvard, he made a name ae himself as a man of 
sound scholarship, of broad culture, and of commanding person- 
ality. He seems, however, to have been jealous of his own pre- 
eminence, and to have discouraged rane every. possible 
rival in his ie field. Few indeed, duri 
years, were the sucticans who ventured to ane with him upon 
any botanical matter on which he had expressed an opinion. His 
assistant at Harvard in his later years, and his successor, was Dr. 
Sereno Watson, a man of similarly scholarly attainments. 
In one line, however, Gray had a worthy rival. Alphonso 
Wood possessed neither the talents nor the advantages of Asa 
Gray, but his class-book of botany always disputed with Gray’s 
manual the right to popular approval as a working reference 
book upon the flora of the northeastern United States. Nor w. 
Wood’s work patterned after that of Gray; its first saith 
appeared several months earlier, and its later editions covered a 
considerably larger field, while the author always persisted in 
giving clear expression to his own views. Dr. Alvan W. Chap- 
man, on the other hand, who wrote the well-known flora of the 
southern United States, was an author in little more than name, 
the absolute authority of Dr. Gray being recognized throughout 
the work 
During the years when Dr. Gray monopolized nearly all of the 
work on the taxonomy of flowering plants in this country, there 
arose a number of specialists in plant-groups in which he took 
little interest — for he realized that it was impossible for one man 
