NEWS NOTES 



Dr. Hugo deVries died on May 21 in his eighty-eighth year. 

 He was best known for his development of the mutation theory 

 and for his study of evolution by the experimental method. He 

 was professor of botany at the University of Amsterdam and 

 director of the Amsterdam Botanical Garden from 1878 to 1918. 

 In 1900 he rediscovered the work of Gregor Mendel. In 1901 he 

 published "The Mutation Theory." 



Richard Morris Holman, associate professor of botany at 

 the University of California, died suddenly on April 23. He 

 was forty-nine years old. 



The United States Department of Agriculture, in coopera- 

 tion with the state agricultural experiment stations, foreign 

 genetic institutions and private plant and animal breeders is 

 making a search for the best existing strains of plant and animal 

 life. There is being assembled a catalog of plant and animal germ 

 plasm proved to be superior for such characters as productivity, 

 disease resistance, and ability to transmit desirable character- 

 istics. A committee under the chairmanship of O. E. Reed, 

 chief of the Bureau of Dairy Industry, and including Dr. A. F. 

 Blakeslee of the Department of Genetics, the Carnegie Institu- 

 tion, is assembling and analyzing a mass of data. The product of 

 this survey will appear in the 1936 Yearbook of the Department 

 of Agriculture and will probably require some 300 pages in that 

 book. 



At the second annual meeting of the Florida Botanical 

 Garden and Arboretum Association, Dr. A. J. Grout of Newfane, 

 Yt., and Manatee, Fla., was elected president of the Board of 

 Trustees. 



The Brooklyn Botanic Garden celebrated its twenty-fifth 

 anniversary from May 13 to 16. The program included recep- 

 tions in the garden and buildings, special exhibits and morning, 

 afternoon and evening meetings with addresses stressing the 

 advances in various fields of botany during the last twenty-five 

 years. Among these addresses were — Virus diseases of plants, 



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