To PROFESSOR JOHN MERLE COULTER 



The achievements of the Department of Botany of the University of Chicago are 

 your achievements; they had their origin in your consciousness and have attained 

 reaUty under your far-seeing guidance. We, the Doctors in Botany, prize the honor 

 of being a living part of these achievements, for your ideas and ideals find themselves 

 reflected in us and in our work. Our interest and faith in a progressive science have 

 been aroused and encouraged by your enthusiasm for the advance of scientific knowledge, 

 and we venture to hope that the paths followed by our individual strivings, toward 

 research, toward the spread of knowledge, and toward well-ordered human life, may 

 be increasingly worthy of bping regarded as extensions of the paths — already famiUar 

 to you — that have led to us and to the other products of your Department. 



Following your lead, we take it as our part to press forward in the advance of 

 scientific thought, and to bring whatever of intelligence and power may lie in us to 

 bear upon progressive readjustment, both in things botanical and in such other fields 

 as opportunity may present. Especially have you led us to recognize the paramount 

 importance of mutual respect, sympathy and true cooperation among intellectual 

 workers, and the need for toleration in the disagreements that arise from the incomplete- 

 ness of human knowledge and from our inadequate appreciation of the complex of 

 things about us. 



We have desired to express to you the high esteem in which we hold you and your 

 work, and this Quarter-Centennial of the University has seemed to us to offer a fitting 

 occasion for the gratification of this desire. We have therefore tried to sjTnbolize our 

 great regard for you and our appreciation of what you have done for us, in the form 

 of this volume, which we wish to present to you as a token of these things. Here is 

 an incomplete record of your own work and a record representing each one of the 

 Chicago Doctors in Botany. We hope you will look upon these sheets as our individual 

 expressions of esteem and regard, and we also hope that they may bring you some 

 pleasm-e in the thought that the aims that have led you in the upbuilding of this Depart- 

 ment of Botany are being carried out stUl further, at many places and in many direc- 

 tions, in the activities of eighty-one different persons. 



We place the book in your hands with the wish that yom- work may continue for 

 many pleasant and profitable j^ears, and that your Department may add many more 

 members to our group of 



The Doctohs in Botany 



OF THE UnIVEESITT OF CHICAGO 



Chicago, June the Fifth, 

 Nineteen Hundred and Sixteen. 



