TORREYA 



Vol. 41 January-February, 1941 No. I 



Mr;/ voRK 



A Tribute to Mr. George Tracy Hastings 



During the last twenty years Mr. Hastings has been a most 

 effective editor of Torre ya. Anyone who has looked over the pub- 

 Hcations of Torreya cannot leave them without a feeling that a 

 great deal of work and energy went into the pages of this journal. 

 Editing Torreya was a pleasure and a labor of love that he thor- 

 oughly enjoyed. 



Mr. Hastings' undergraduate work was carried on at Cornell 

 University and for two years after he was a graduate assistant in 

 botany at his Alma Mater. For some period of years he was a teacher 

 at a Mission School in Santiago, Chile. One of his early pubHca- 

 tions was "Notes on the Flora of Central Chile" in Volume 6 of 

 the Plant World. This was followed by a contribution, "Observa- 

 tions of the Flora of Chile," published in the Bulletin of the Torrey 

 Botanical Club in 1905. After a year of teaching at Winona, N. J., 

 he joined the staff of the Philadelphia Commercial Museum as an 

 economic botanist and carried on graduate work at the University 

 of Pennsylvania. 



Mr. Hastings entered the DeWitt Clinton High School as a 

 teacher in biology in 1910 and remained in this position until he 

 entered war work with the Y. M. C. A. On his return from service 

 he entered Evander Childs High School and carried on graduate 

 work at Columbia University which honored him with an M.A. 

 degree. With the opening of the new Theodore Roosevelt High 

 School on Fordham Road he was made head of the department of 

 biology and carried on in this position until his retirement in 1940. 

 Mr. Hastings was a member of Sigma Psi. The pages of Torreya 

 give eloquent proof of the many contributions he made to the field 

 of botany. 



Air. Hastings not only led trips for the Torrey Botanical Club 

 but organized an extensive field course in biology for teachers in 

 the New York area. These field trips helped materially in the edu- 



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