Lucien Marcus Underwood

“ Like many of the standard books even of recent descriptive botanical literature it is all in Latin, which goes to prove that in botany, at least, Latin is not a dead language. I venture the assertion that as much Latin is read daily within the walls of the museum of the New York Botanical Garden as in any building in New York city, not excepting the departments of Latin in its colleges. ”

“ But space forbids us to follow farther the general development of our knowledge of the world's flora as depicted in the various works emanating from the geniuses of the generations. We can only mention in passing a few of the landmarks that stand as beacons along the course of systematic botany. Here is an early one at Berlin where the brilliant Willdenow, though dying at forty-seven, gave us a rational ‘Species Plantarum’ the fourth since Linnaeus and the first that really described plants from their characters. ”

“ Perhaps no single book did more to serve as a logical introduction to the more advanced literature of the subject and to give to younger students their first broad outlook in botany, than that issued in 1878 by one of the most successful teachers of botany in America-as well as one of the most genial of men — Professor Charles E. Bessey.
Thirty years ago there were, as we have said, only three professors of botany in all this country. Now the species has become so common that one is no longer a novelty ”

“ In this broader sense all botanists, whether they are only cytologists, whether they deal with the fascinating problems of embryological development, whether they are field ecologists, or finally whether they are just botanists pure and simple, because they love the things of nature and can not help being botanists if they are anything at all — all these are systematic botanists, even though some of them appear to others as unsystematic, when their wilder flights into the realm of the imagination cause them to become mere theorists with no stable foundation in real facts. ”

“ Thirty years ago botany was a subject thought to be fit only for girls, but now it ceases to cause a smile when full-grown men take to it seriously, though some of our antiquated coworkers in other university lines still wonder how it is possible to teach the subject except when the spring sunshine favors the growth of the early flowers! ”

“ Of that large array who pursue botany as far as light comedy, because somebody wrote ‘How to know the dandelions in their lair’ and roll such polysyllables as Taraxacum and Leontopodium glibly from their tongues in order to impress the unwitting citizen of their accomplishments, we have little to say; they are of a class so foreign, that though often loud-spoken, as foreigners sometimes become, they are not botanists to the manor born and never will become anything but sutlers. ”

“ But there were others who studied afield, who knew their plants from their living habits rather than from their fragmentary mummies, and one or two were bold enough to make their own statements in opposition to ‘authority’ and to stand by them. One of these, a son of New England, but broadened by residence in Illinois, Wisconsin, Colorado and California, raised a standard against the one-man policy that had obtained so long in American botany, and his work was the cause of such mental strain that Gray's nervous tension could not bear it. ”

“ Colorado, Utah, Nevada, Arizona and all California were quiet Mexican provinces undisturbed by the searcher either for ore or for plants, as peaceful as when the first missionaries of the cross opened up their missions among them, two centuries before. Soon politics entered and commerce, its ally, followed in its wake. The annexation of Texas in 1845 was followed by the Mexican war, through which the region from Texas to Oregon came over as the first great expansion of American territory since the Louisiana purchase. ”

“ It is interesting to note how the study of the American flora has gone hand in hand with the political development of the country. When Torrey and Gray published their first great flora of North America in 1838-1843, the territory of the United States, which was all it attempted to cover, was very largely east of the Mississippi. Buffaloes and Indians held the great west from Arkansas to the Saskatchewan. Texas was just struggling for freedom from Mexico, as Mexico herself had recently struggled to secure her own liberation from Spain. ”

“ Before another generation of botanists shall have come to the front, American botany will have fully entered into its proper heritage, the Flora of pan-America, — and this future Flora of 1937 will include in it the one remaining botanical dark continent of all the world — South America — and the geographic limits of this flora will be Behring Strait and the Strait of Magellan. ”

“ After Gray's death in 1888, the center of study on the North American flora shifted from Cambridge, and new centers sprang up in Washington, at St. Louis, where George Engelmann, one of our German-American botanists, had long been at work, and in California, where Professor Greene then held a university chair. At New York, where botany had been largely dormant since the death of Torrey in 1873, the subject was revived under the leadership of a young man whose modesty forbids my pronouncing a eulogy on him living. ”

“ The works of German scholars, previously buried to all but the select few, became more widely known, and many of them were translated into English and thus brought within the reach of all students. The German language has become a sine qua non of the botanist in whatever field of investigation he enters, and a prominent cause of the backwardness and decline of botany in England, during the generation just past, is largely attributable to the fact that until very recently few of their botanists have been able to read the German language. ”

“ So multifarious have become the problems that have entered into the study of botany in these latter days, that it is sometimes difficult for a layman, brought up in the ancient conception of botany as the mere study of flowers, to understand the breadth of scientific training involved in the development of a modern botanist ”

“ The time for botanical work must be stolen from his recreation hours when not active in his profession, so that while Torrey was first and foremost a botanist from choice, he was a chemist by profession, and managed to work at his beloved plants in the hours not spent in an assaying office or in teaching chemistry to the students of the College of Physicians and Surgeons. ”

“ Subsequently the necessity for the fixation of generic types1 became apparent as more serious study of the whole subject advanced, and new features were introduced into what is now known as the ‘American Code of Nomenclature.’ The mutual concessions at the Vienna Congress of 1905 resulted in removing the most objectionable features of the propositions of both parties in the controversy, and in bringing about practical unanimity on this side of the water. Old beliefs die hard, however, and the region beyond the River Charles appears to be an appropriate place for beliefs to die. ”

“ Many of these early herbals were printed in Latin as the standard language of medicine and learning generally, but later they were printed in the vernacular of the country in which they were written, and often something symbolic of the particular plant they illustrated was added to appeal more strongly to the mind of the reader. ”

“ Porta in 1591 published page after page of illustrations showing fancied resemblances between plants and all sorts of human and animal parts, and often the discovery of such a similarity to some part of the human frame led to the unwarranted conclusion that the Almighty thus pointed out to mortals a definite specific in the plant thus possessing this resemblance. ”

“ Both of these were followed by the veteran collector, Pringle, who finding Arizona and California too small for his ambitions, traveled year after year throughout Mexico from Chihuahua to Tehuantepec. Time forbids the mention of the many others, even by name, who, in their untiring zeal for botanical exploration, not unlike those mentioned by the sacred writer, “subdued kingdoms . ”