BOX 

 QA 



TORREYA 



Vol. 45 December 1945 No. 4 



Some 19th Century Recollections of New York and Its 

 Botanical Activities 



Roland M. Harper 



In the fall of 1899 I went to New York to begin graduate work in botany 

 at Columbia University. For two years immediately preceding I had lived in 

 Massachusetts, and for ten years before that in Georgia, where I began the 

 study of botany in the spring of 1895. 



Up to 1899 my formal training in botany had been limited to an elementary 

 course of about four months at the University of Georgia, given by a pro- 

 fessor of "biology" who was primarily a zoologist, as in many small colleges 

 at that time ; x and it was chiefly devoted to the identification of flowering 

 plants. 



As far as I knew then, the main object of botanical investigation was floristic, 

 discovering and describing as many species of plants as possible, and outlining 

 their distribution, as the writers of manuals had done. 2 In Georgia I had used 

 Gray's "School and Field Botany," Wood's "Botanist and Florist," and Chap- 

 man's "Flora of the Southern United States" (second edition) for plant identi- 

 fications, and in Massachusetts I became acquainted with Gray's "Manual" 

 (sixth edition). The first volume of Britton & Brown's epoch-making "Illus- 

 trated Flora" appeared in 1896, while I was still in Georgia, and I saw it 

 there, but did not have much occasion, or opportunity, to use it until I came 

 to New York. 



While in Massachusetts I had gotten hold of a few odd numbers of the 

 Asa Gray Bulletin, Fern Bulletin, and Torrey Bulletin, and had seen every 

 issue of Rhodora, which began in January, 1899. I had also visited Cambridge 



1 It happens that this same man a few years before had written for the U. S. Bureau 

 of Education a circular on biological teaching in the United States, which instigated a 

 spirited discussion of the subject by Conway MacMillan and others, than ran through at 

 least a dozen issues of Science, between April 7 and December 22, 1893, and covered 

 nearly 14 large quarto pages. In the second series of the same magazine, over half a cen- 

 tury later, between January 28 and June 9, 1944 — nearly six pages in all — the same subject 

 was thrashed out again, with very similar arguments, by five men who had apparently 

 completely overlooked the controversy of 1893, though one of them did refer to an article 

 on the subject published in 1919. 



2 For a discussion of the difference between flora and vegetation see Torreya 17: 1-3. 

 January, 1917. 



Torreya for December (Vol. 45, 97-141) was issued January 25, 1946. 



97 



