Augusts, 1900.] 



SCIENCE. 



163 



any offered in his undergraduate collegiate 

 work in 1875. It was a course of lectures 

 given by a • great and good man, but one 

 whose first love was geology and not botany, 

 and extended through a short term of 

 twelve weeks in which we were instructed 

 in some of the details of the structure of 

 the flowering plants something after the 

 pattern set in Gray's lessons, after which 

 we were directed how to use Gray's 

 Manual for determining the unknown 

 names of such familiar plants as the Tril- 

 lium, the spring beauty, the wild geranium 

 and the white daisy with all the array of 

 names like Leueanthemum chrysanthemum that 

 nearly paralyzed such of the students as 

 had pursued a long course in Greek. There 

 was scarcely a word as to the homology of 

 parts, relationship of plants to each other 

 or to their environment. Kot a word was 

 breathed about the world of cryptogamic 

 organisms ; the ferns and fungi were alike 

 tabooed, and liverworts and lichens may as 

 well have had a non-existence for we never 

 heard them mentioned, and went out of col- 

 lege ignorant of their existence at least from 

 any direct information from the instructor. 

 The compound microscope was sealed to us 

 except as an illustration of the application 

 of the principles of optics, but we well re- 

 member the half day of unalloyed pleasure 

 when we stole into the room where it was 

 usually securely locked in its case and for 

 once found the case open. How we rev- 

 eled in a set of prepared slides and had 

 our first self-taught lesson in plant his- 

 tology. 



This personal reminiscence is not an un- 

 usual picture for those times, for then there 

 were in the country only two or three col- 

 leges where there was a distinctive professor 

 of botany, and even in these more favored 

 institutions the character of the instruction 

 was much the same as I have pictured. 

 Ecology was unheard of in the schools ; 

 plant physiology was scarcely mentioned 



and indeed its only printed exponent avail- 

 able was ' How Plants Grow, Gray.' Evo- 

 lution was some unholy doctrine about 

 monkeys that contradicted the Bible. It 

 was with the force of an electric shock that 

 a short time later the translation of Sachs ' 

 Botany opened to our astounded eyes the 

 manner in which we as students had been 

 robbed of the knowledge of the splendid ad- 

 vance of the science that had been in prog- 

 ress in Germany during the middle half of 

 the present century. Soon after this, Bes- 

 sey's ' Botany' for schools appeared, and it is 

 no exaggeration to say that since the time 

 when Amos Eaton's first class in Williams 

 College begged the privilege to publish for 

 him the first and most famous edition of his 

 manual, no single book has appeared that 

 for its time has proved a more valuable con- 

 tribution to botanical teaching in America. 

 Bessey's work was particularly useful at this 

 time because it served to introduce the 

 younger student to Sachs ' more extensive 

 and difficult text-book and showed him that 

 there were other and broader considerations 

 in botany than the mere ' analysis of 

 flowers,' and gave him for the first time a 

 rational conception of that underworld of 

 plant life of which the hitherto one-sided 

 facilities for study had robbed him. Since 

 that time wave after wave of lines of botan- 

 ical investigation and methods of teaching 

 have swept over us, and system after system 

 of elementary instruction has been proposed 

 and has been crystallized or more often pre- 

 sented in an amorphous condition in the 

 numerous text-books and laboratory man- 

 ualp of the past fifteen years. 



I should add here that indirectly a second 

 factor greatly stimulated the development 

 of the new botany, namely the introduction 

 of elementary biological study in the schools, 

 for about this time Huxley's ' Biology ' ap- 

 peared and from an English stimulus Amer- 

 ican students commenced the development 

 of biological investigation from a new stand- 



