160  Change  from  Old  to  New  Botany.     {  Am-AJPXi9ih3arm* 
opportunity  came  in  1870  when  Gray  returned  from  Europe.  Dur- 
ing his  absence  Horace  Mann,  Jr.,  who  had  been  taking  his  place, 
died  and  I  was  then  appointed  assistant.  I  was  always  interested 
in  cryptogams  and,  had  it  been  possible  for  me  to  do  as  I  pleased, 
I  should  never  have  studied  anything  but  marine  algae  during  the 
rest  of  my  life.  It  became  my  duty  to  arrange -the  thallophytes 
of  the  Gray  Herbarium  and  the  work  I  did  was  radical,  I  assure 
you.  Not  knowing  that  Littleton  Island  was  near  the  North  Pole, 
but  supposing  it  to  be  somewhere  in  Long  Island,  I  arranged  into 
the  waste-paper  basket  a  number  of  rather  shabby-looking  algae 
which  I  afterwards  discovered  to  my  mortification  were  very  rare. 
It  did  not  take  long  for  me  to  find  out  that,  whatever  professors 
of  pedagogy  may  say,  one  can  not  teach  a  subject  without  knowing 
something  about  it.  But  where  was  I  to  go  to  study  cryptogams? 
It  was  proposed  that  I  should  study  fungi  with  M.  A.  Curtis,  but 
he  died  in  1872.  For  marine  algae  I  had  to  depend  on  Harvey's 
"  Nereis  "  and  J.  G.  Agardh's  "  Species,"  works  which  were  not 
easily  followed  by  a  beginner,  with  occasional  reference  to  the  by 
no  means  exhilarating  "  Micrographic  Dictionary." 
Evidently,  I  must  go  to  Europe,  and  Germany  was  the  country 
whose  universities  offered  the  greatest  facilities  for  my  purpose. 
The  most  promising  were  those  of  Strassburg,  where  De  Bary  was 
professor,  and  Wuerzburg,  where  was  Sachs.  I  chose  the  former 
rather  at  a  venture.  The  other  botanists  there  were  Solms  and 
Fr.  Schmitz,  then  a  very  young  man  whose  work  had  been  in 
histology.  The  venerable  W.  P.  Schimper,  the  bryologist  and 
paleontologist,  whose  valuable  herbarium  had  been  given  to  the 
university  before  the  Franco-German  war,  remained  in  charge  of  it 
and  gave  a  course  of  lectures.  My  fellow  students  were  Stahl, 
Rostafinski,  Gilkinet,  Suppanetz,  an  Austrian,  Kemienski,  who 
recently  died  at  Odessa,  Karl  Lindstedt  and  Doelbruck,  who  died 
young.  I  learned  that  I  was  not  the  first  American  who  had 
studied  with  De  Bary.  A  short  time  before,  while  he  was  pro- 
fessor at  Halle,  an  American,  T.  D.  Biscoe,  had  taken  a  course 
in  botany,  although  not  studying  botany  as  a  specialty.  The  only 
information  I  have  in  regard  to  Mr.  Biscoe  is  that  he  published 
a  paper  on  the  winter  state  of  our  duckweeds  in  the  American 
Naturalist  of  1873.  There  was  only  one  other  American,  a  law 
student,  at  Strassburg  when  I  arrived  there,  for.  to  the  surprise 
of  my  fellow-botanists  I  was  not  willing  to  acknowledge  as  a  fellow- 
