PROFESSOR WILLIAM RUSSEL DUDLEY* 

 By Professor George James Peirce 



WILLIAM RussEL DUDLEY, professor of systematic botany in Leland 

 Stanford Junior University from 1892 to 1911, died on June 4, 1911, 

 at the age of sixty-two. By ancestry and place of birth a New 

 Englander, a graduate and for twenty years a member of the botanical staff 

 of Cornell University, a student of De Bary's for a time in Strasburg, he 

 brought to California the mature powers of an enthusiastic student and 

 sympathetic lover of nature, the ripe scholarship and the winning personality 

 of the inspiring teacher. At home in the laboratory, he was still more 

 strikingly the gracious host when he was with students and other friends 

 out of doors, in the fields and woods and mountain forests. 



He knew the forests of middle California as no one else; his acquaint- 

 ance was with individual trees, as his collection of tree portraits testifies. 

 And his studies of their geographical distribution, following and amplify- 

 ing the earlier studies of Asa Gray and others, gave his knowledge a degree 

 of accuracy and detail, as well as breadth, which was very precious. It 

 is to be hoped that his notes and other manuscripts are in such condition 

 that his associates and successor can give them to the world. 



Professor Dudley's nature was so sensitive, his perceptions so fine, and 

 his ideals so high, that he could but rarely bring himself to publish what 

 he knew. He wished always to add to and improve what he had learned 

 and written. Thus the botanical world had little opportunity to know his 

 accomplishments and achievements. 



Besides the young men and women whose lives he has enriched, and 

 the Forest Service which he long assisted in various ways, he contributed 

 to the great gift to California and the nation which the state and national 

 forests of California constitute. The "Big Basin Park," the property of 

 the state, will preserve to all time a part of the natural redwood forest 

 of the Santa Cruz mountains. Professor Dudley assisted in securing and 

 preserving as a state park this part of the virgin forest of Sequoia semper- 

 virens. It was his 'interest too which stimulated and directed the federal 

 authorities in the selection of others of the mountain forests of California 

 as national forests. 



Of courtly manner, cultivated as well as educated, of ripe scholarship 

 and rich in the knowledge of nature, he was a lovable and elevating associate, 

 an inspiring teacher, a devoted man of science, an honor to Stanford Uni- 

 versity of which he was an honored member. 



*From The Plant World, Vol. XIV, No. 8, pp. 200-202, August, 1911. 



