9 8 
THE PLANT WORLD. 
A BRIEF HISTORY OF ECOLOGICAL WORK IN 
BOTANY. 
By Howard S. Reed, 
The University of Missouri. 
( Conclusion .) 
In the next decade in Germany we see the beginning of much 
valuable ecological work. 
A mass of careful observations are recorded by Dr. Hermann 
M. Muller in a book published in 1873 entitled Die Befruchtung 
der Blumen, or The Fertilisation of Flowers by Insects. His 
observations cover much the same ground as did those of 
Sprengel eighty years before, but he treats the mechanisms of 
flowers from the standpoint of natural selection instead of 
teleology. 
In the same year there appeared Hildebrand's book upon the 
Modes of Dissemination of Plants. The author was professor 
of botany in the University of Freiburg. His book remains to 
this day the only scientific study of seed dispersal, although 
there is much to be gained from an investigation of the subject 
with modern histological methods. 
In the period between 1876 and 1880 we find the first papers 
from two German botanists who have done much for the study 
of plant distribution, Oskar Drude and Adolf Engler. The most 
of Drude’s publications have appeared since 1884 and his Hand- 
buck der Pdansengeographie was published in 1890. Drude is 
now professor of botany in the Technische Hochschule in Dres¬ 
den. Engler is professor in the University of Berlin, and during 
the past twenty-five years has contributed many valuable mono¬ 
graphs on the classification and distribution of plants. In con¬ 
junction with Drude, he is now issuing Die Vegetation der Erde, 
a work which contemplates nothing short of a description of the 
flora of the earth, according to the natural divisions. 
The work of these two men may be said to mark the beginning 
of the study of phytogeography by a school of ecologists who 
