Pioneer Investigators of Photosynthesis. 205 
skilled playwright who gave to the various scenes the polish his 
predecessors, from the very nature of things, could not accord to 
them, and who arranged them in the sequence necessary to weave 
them into a logical and convincing story. More than forty years 
had to elapse befose Daubeny and Draper re-opened De Saussure’s 
Book to outline a new chapter on the kind of light that was 
concerned in the decomposition of carbon dioxide, a chapter 
completed in quite recent years by Timiriazeff, Reinke and 
Engelmann. Another chapter on the first synthetic products was 
sketched out by Sachs in the early sixties, elaborated by Von 
Baeyer and later still by Bokorny, Curtius, Pollacci and Loeb, and 
yet another on the nature of the pigment so closely associated with 
the photosynthetic phenomena, started by Fremy and Kraus, added 
to by Schunck and Marchlewski and, at the present moment, by 
Willstatter and his pupils. 
The story is by no means complete even yet, for recent 
researches by Moore, Stoklasa, Zdobnicky and others, would appear 
to hint at colloidal iron and ultra-violet light as factors in the 
process and as taking a great and hitherto unsuspected part in the 
phenomena, at first sight apparently so exasperatingly simple, yet 
on further investigation, so complex and elusive as those that take 
place in a green leaf when exposed to sunlight. Amid the bewilder¬ 
ing multiplicity of new facts being brought to light from day to 
day, and the diversity of explanations offered of the intricate 
processes summed up under the term “ photosynthesis,” it is 
essential to bear in mind how much is owing to the great pioneers 
who, after all, laid so truly and well the foundations of the temple 
Modern Botany is now striving to complete. 
