202 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XVII. No. 423. 



flavor of crude drugs, it was administered 

 to the pharmacy class engaged in the study 

 of adulterants. Then, too, there was the 

 so-called eryptogamie botany, and, finally, 

 the general biology, after Huxley and 

 Martin, in which the steps of evolution 

 from protococcus to frog were succinctly 

 unfolded. None of the instructor's col- 

 leagues had the slightest suspicion of what 

 it was aU about, and the students — well 

 they learned some things in spite of their 

 environment and the teaching they got. 



As for the books used— the Centralblatt 

 was not in existence, but this mattered 

 little, for neither was the enormous litera- 

 ture it has since recorded. The Botanische 

 Zeitung was regularly published, but the 

 library committee had no use for it, and 

 much the same was true of most of the 

 periodicals that every working botanist now 

 finds indispensable; but we had Sachs's 

 'Text-book of Botany' and the big picture- 

 book of LeMaout and Deeaisne, and on the 

 shelves were Sullivant's 'leones Musco- 

 rum,' and dear old Berkeley, and Cooke's 

 'British Fungi,' with all their impossibil- 

 ities, and last, but not least, the reports of 

 the government microscopist, of which we 

 can not speak particularly. 



The rest of the outfit was in keeping. 

 Microscopes, of a certain sort, there were, 

 but no other apparatus whatever. Razors 

 were sharpened on a weU-hacked strap, 

 iodine and sulphuric acid constituted the 

 reagents, and the enthusiasm of fellow ad- 

 venturers in an unknown country kept up 

 the courage of young men and women who 

 walked by faith and saw but little. 



All these untoward conditions harmo- 

 nized with the stage of development of the 

 science itself. In this country there were 

 only the laboratories of Harvard that had 

 anything to attract special students in 

 botany, and abroad even the laboratories 

 at Leipzig and Bonn had little to offer com- 



pared with the magnificent work now asso- 

 ciated with the names of Pf effer and Stras- 

 burger; in vegetable pathology the simple 

 methods of DeBary and Brefeld, though 

 coupled with infinite patience and some 

 remarkable results, gave little promise of 

 what has since been achieved. In conti- 

 nental laboratories, for the most part, de- 

 velopmental history began with the punc- 

 tum vegetationis instead of the egg cell. 

 Anatomy was largely a matter of fibro- 

 vascular bundles, and the literature of 

 mitosis was unwritten. In short, botany, 

 as we know it to-day, was as yet only a 

 potentiality. 



The men, too, who represented the sci- 

 ence in America, how few they were and 

 how isolated. There were Gray and Wat- 

 son, Eaton, Austin, Prentiss, Engelmann 

 and a very short list of botanists contem- 

 porary with them who are still at work. 

 We seldom saw one another, and we had no 

 dreams of gatherings like these, at which 

 the working botanists of the country are 

 numbered by scores, too many already com- 

 fortably to hear one another talk. 



Now all is changed. With the coming 

 in of the new century the multiplied vol- 

 umes of the Centralblatt and the Jalires- 

 bericht tell the story of an unequaled pro- 

 ductiveness, and a literature which, aa 

 measured by number of periodicals, now 

 considerably outranks that of any other 

 science whatever. 



And this literature is, much of it, widely 

 different from that of the earlier days. 

 Without essaying the heroic task of re- 

 viewing even the main lines of progress, 

 I wish in passing to recall with you cer- 

 tain very significant changes that are tak- 

 ing place. First in systematic botany. 

 You are familiar with the fact that, as 

 the result of observations extending 

 through some seventeen years, De Vries has 

 recorded the actual origin of various species 



