THE AMERICAN NATURALIST 



[Vol. XLIII 



to illustrate the point of view that has been developed, 

 which after all is the significant thing in our progress. 

 It would be tedious and unprofitable to enumerate the long 

 list of important new facts that have been discovered. 

 Besides, these new facts are most of them so technical 

 that any brief reference to them would be intelligible 

 only to those who do not need the information. In clos- 

 ing, I may venture to suggest a future development which 

 seems extremely desirable. The general problems upon 

 which we are now engaged must involve the examination 

 of an enormous amount of material before we can feel any 

 confidence in our conclusions. It ought to be possible to 

 associate investigators or laboratories in a general attack 

 upon any problem conceded to be important enough to 

 justify such a united effort. Whenever this has been 

 done in a laboratory possessing several investigators, the 

 result has been Striking. We must begin to combine our 

 detached efforts, the guerilla method of attack, and sup- 

 port individual effort by association. The scheme is only 

 a thought, and the details may make it impossible, but 

 I believe that we have reached a point where something 

 of this kind is demanded for definite and substantial 

 progress. 



II. The Pbogress of Plant Anatomy During the Past 

 Decade 



PROFESSOR EDWARD C. JEFFREY 

 Harvard University 



The fascinating problem of the alternation of liVTieva- 

 tions in the higher plants is responsible for the fact that 

 the attention of morphologists, since Hofmeister, has been 

 turned largely to the spore-producing organs and the 

 gametophytes. This tendency can be counted as entirely 

 fortunate, for the closer affinity of the gametophyte with 

 the presumably ancestral forms and the progressive re- 



