42 TORREYA 



Torrey Botanical Club, and his interest in botany, increased and encouraged 

 by the Club, soon led to his determination to choose botany for his future 

 career. Accordingly he accepted a minor position at Columbia College, was 

 rapidlv promoted to a professorship, and retired as professor emeritus at the 

 earlv age of thirty-seven. His name was Nathaniel Lord Britton, and his 

 retirement from the educational field was only to enable him to devote his 

 tireless energy to the development of the New York Botanical Garden. It was 

 his understanding and vision which led to the building of a scientific institu- 

 tion rather than a specialized park, to the accumulation of a great herbarium 

 and a splendid taxonomic library, and through them to the provision of oppor- 

 tunity for taxonomic research by two score members of his staft', by some 

 hundreds of visiting taxonomists, and through the loan of herbarium material 

 by still more botanists in all parts of the world. In this place and before this 

 audience we do not need to dwell on the taxonomic achievements of Britton. 

 They are well known to all of us. But let us remember, as Britton himself 

 remembered, that to the Torrey Botanical Club he owed his botanical inspira- 

 tion and that to the Club he returned his thanks by his final generous provision 

 for its permanent endowment. 



Fifth and last is a physician, Henry Hurd Rusby, whose name first appears 

 in the Bulletin of the Torrey Club in 1878. So interested in botany was he 

 that even before he completed his medical education he had spent much time 

 collecting plants in the southwest, and soon after receiving his medical degree 

 he left for South America to explore for medicinal plants ; a search which was 

 successful, as we all know. This mixture of botany and medicine made of him 

 a pharmacognocist. During the remainder of his long life, 42 years of which 

 were spent as professor and dean at the New York College of Pharmacy, he 

 had every incentive to devote his energies entirely to pharmaceutical education 

 and the fight for pure food and drugs, in which he took a prominent part. 

 Without doubt, it was the enthusiasm which he drew from the Torrey Club 

 w^hich led him to continue botany as his hobby and to devote to it every 

 possible minute which he could save from his regular work. Even in his last 

 decade, when failing eyesight made botanical work exceedingly difficult, he 

 continued to study his collections and to write short articles. 



In 1887 Rusby had before him his extensive collections of South American 

 plants, largely made by himself but supplemented by many sheets from the 

 older Bolivian collectors Mandon and Bang. None of them was named ; com- 

 parative material was scanty in the herbarium of Columbia College, and even 

 current literature was poorly represented in the Columbia library. So far as 

 North American botanists were concerned. South America was almost terra 

 incognita. Undismayed by the difficulty of the task, Rusby set to work on these 

 plants and also enlisted the aid of the rapidly rising young botanist, N. L. Brit- 



