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Rostafinski, Sorokin, Gilkinet, Lindstedt, and others. He was 

 strongly influenced by the personality of DeBary himself, his wide 

 knowledge, ability, earnestness, and high ideals of care and accuracy 

 in scientific work. The training which he thus acquired served as a 

 fitting complement to that which he received from Asa Gray, the im- 

 press of whose systematic predilections was thus tempered by DeBary's 

 very different point of view. Work of a taxonomic or even of a gen- 

 eral nature was not encouraged in the latter's laboratory, and he was 

 regarded by Dr. Farlow as somewhat narrow in his conception of the 

 scope and extent of the preparation desirable in the preliminary training 

 of a botanist. He was not himself, however, restricted to a special 

 topic until more than a year after he entered the laboratory, when 

 DeBary, having observed the vegetative development of a fern sporo- 

 phyte from the prothallus, turned the subject over to him for investiga- 

 tion. The resultant paper, on "An asexual growth from the prothallus 

 of Pteris cretica," published in the Botanische Zeitung and elsewhere, at- 



■ 



tracted wide attention and interest, and, although it was at first attacked 

 from all sides, rendered his name familiar to botanists everywhere. 



His reputation was thus well established when he returned to America 

 in the summer of 1874, and was appointed to an assistant professorship 

 at Harvard, the first special provision in this country for instruction in 

 cryptogamic botany. For some years he was stationed at the Bussey 

 Institution, where his work dealt largely with the economic aspects of 

 mycology, and where he may be said to have laid the foundations of 

 American phytopathology. During this period of 5 years his published 

 papers on fungi were largely devoted to destructive parasites, such as 

 the black knot, grape mildew, onion smut, etc., although he did not 

 neglect the marine algae, and published several articles on the algal 

 impurities of water supplies. 



In 1879 he was transferred to Cambridge as professor of cryptogamic 

 botany, a position which he continued to occupy until his death, after a 

 service on the Harvard faculty of 45 years. He was thus able to devote 

 himself to the Farlow Herbarium, the nucleus of which was the well 

 known Curtis Herbarium, purchased during his absence in P^urope, 

 and of his unrivaled library of books, papers, and journals relating 

 to cryptogamic botany; the development of instruction in different 

 branches of the subject, as well as of productive investigation on his own 

 part and that of his students. 



In 1883 he instituted the numbered series of " Contributions from the 

 Cryptogamic Laboratory of Harvard University," which, up to the 



