1042 The American Naturalist. [December, 
opening of the second volume its name was changed to the Botanical 
Gazette, and the name of M. S. Coulter was added as joint editor. In 
1883 by a reorganization of the management, John M. Coulter, Charles 
R. Barnes and J. C. Arthur became editors, an arrangement which 
proved to be so satisfactory to the botanists of the country as to become 
permanent. 
The next few years were trying ones for the ambitious editors, but 
the impetus given to botanical thought by the incoming of modern 
methods in teaching and study, and perhaps, alsv, by the organization 
of the Botanical Club of the American Association for the Advance- 
ment of Science, proved helpful in many ways. The Philadelphia 
(1884) and Ann Arbor (1885) meetings of the Botanical Club created 
much botanical enthusiasm, the results of which accrued to the benefit 
of the Gazette. 
The beginning of its second decade saw it much enlarged, improved 
in typography and apparently well established in the confidence of 
American botanists. Year by year it was still further increased in 
size, better paper was used, and the quality of the matter steadily im- 
proved. From the fifty-two pages of short, and mostly local, notes of 
volume I, we turn to the five hundred and sixty-eight pages of struct- 
ural, physiological, ecological, systematic and paleontological matter 
in volume XX. With the opening of the twenty-first volume an addi- 
tional enlargement was found to be necessary, the numbers averaging 
sixty-five pages each. 
In the earlier volumes there were no plates, the first one occurring 
in volume VI, illustrating an article by J. C. Arthur on the trichomes 
of Echinocystis lobata. In the twentieth volume there were thirty-seven 
plates, while for the first half of 1896 the number was twenty-nine. 
The last stage in the evolution of this important factor in American 
botany was reached a few months ago when its financial management 
was transferred to the University of Chicago. It thus happily becomes 
an endowed institution, and the editors, relieved from all anxiety as to 
its business management, are free to develop it along strictly scientific 
lines. To the three editors whose efforts have given it the foremost place 
place among botanical journals are hereafter to be added several 
“associate editors ” ; at present these are G. F. Atkinson, V. M. Spald- 
ing, Roland Thaxter and William Trelease. Under the new regime it 
promises to be more cosmopolitan than before, and accordingly we are 
assured that the names of one or more Kompan botanists will soon be 
added to the corps of editors. 
