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SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XII. No. 292. 



advancement followed settlement northward 

 up Manhattan Island. It was little wonder 

 that this college early came to foster bo- 

 tanical science and later accumulated the 

 foundations that have led up to its pres- 

 ent tender of facilities for botanical re- 

 search along varied lines. 



It is unnecessary in this presence to re- 

 late in detail the incidents which led up to 

 the development of a botanical center here 

 as early as 1831, so that Asa Gray, restive 

 in his work in Central ]N"ew York and cast- 

 ing about for a place where he could study 

 botany, could find no better tutelage than 

 under his master Torrey, and came to 

 New York as Torrey's pupil and finally 

 became his .assistant in the preparation of 

 the Flora of North America, a work that 

 will ever stand as a masterpiece in Ameri- 

 can botany, combining with the critical acu- 

 men and exact learning of its senior author 

 the enthusiasm and push of its more youth- 

 ful one. It may, however, be useful at this 

 time to call to mind some of the conditions 

 existing at the time of the first appearance 

 of Torrey and Gray's Flora in 183S or even 

 at the period of the issue of the final part 

 of the second uncompleted volume in 1843. 

 The great Louisiana Purchase of 1803 ex- 

 tending northwestward from the mouth of 

 the Mississippi to the Pacific had scarcely 

 been entered by the scientific explorer ex- 

 cept in its Northern portion, and that 

 mainly by Lewis and Clark in their discov- 

 ery of the headwaters of the Columbia and 

 by Long's expedition to the Eocky Moun- 

 tains. Texas and the great Southwest, 

 Utah, Nevada, and California were quiet, 

 Mexico-Spanish possessions alike undis- 

 turbed by the hum of civilization or the 

 visitation of the field botanist except as 

 some wandering explorer like Adelbert 

 Chamisso had touched at the Pacific ports 

 and had skimmed a few memorials of the 

 vast west coast flora, or some Russian ex- 

 pedition had pushed down from their north- 



ern possessions into Northern California. 

 Minnesota and the Northwest were still in 

 the hands of the Indians, and all of Iowa 

 and much of Illinois were raw prairie un- 

 touched by the plow of the pioneer. Chi- 

 cago was a hamlet with a handful of peo- 

 ple struggling with fever and ague on 

 the wind swept marshes at the lower end 

 of Lake Michigan. The South which even 

 yet has scarcely produced an indigenous 

 botanist was then a region untouched since 

 the travels of Michaux, except as Short and 

 Peter had explored Kentucky and Stephen 

 Elliot, the father of Southern botany, had 

 brought to notice something of the flora of 

 the Carolinas. Such in brief was the state 

 of our country and its botanical exploration 

 when Gray received his call to Cambridge 

 and laid there the foundation of a second 

 center of botanical -research. The annexa- 

 tion of Texas as the second of our Spanish 

 acquisitions of territory ; the Mexican war 

 with the commencement of our expansion 

 policy in the cession of California and New 

 Mexico with the attendant military occu- 

 pation and exploration for the settlement 

 of boundaries ; the discovery of gold in 

 California in 1848 and the attendant de- 

 velopment of that Eldorado of immigration, 

 and flnally with the transcontinental rail- 

 road projects of the early fifties, all brought 

 to Torrey and Gray the floral wealth of 

 these extensions of territory and have 

 made the Torrey herbarium at New York 

 and the Gray herbarium at Cambridge the 

 two great repositories of the types of west- 

 ern plants, each supplementing the other 

 in their priceless possessions. 



Few of the present generation of botanical 

 students realize clearly the rapid advance 

 of their science in the past quarter of a 

 century or the conditions under which the 

 student of botany was placed at the begin- 

 ning of that period. It is just an even 

 twenty-five years since your retiring pres- 

 ident completed the solitary course in bot- 



