Marshall Avery Howe

“ The desirability or even the necessity of such a first-hand acquaintance with the living plants in order to gain any adequate notion of their affinities is sufficiently apparent nowadays as regards any particular group, but is perhaps especially obvious in connection with the tropical tree-ferns, species of which, in some cases, have unfortunately been described from small fragments of the dried leaves. ”

“ And his personal acquaintance with plants was remarkably wide even outside of the ferns, the Hepaticae, and the fungi, the groups in which he found his special fields for research. Accordingly, his outlook upon botanical science as a whole had a breadth and sanity that is all too rare in the men that have been schooled in an age of more extreme specialization. ”

“ His work as a teacher of college students was not confined to exclusively botanical lines until he had reached nearly middle age. In his earlier manhood he not only taught geology, zoölogy and chemistry, in addition to botany, but also published several papers dealing with geological, zoölogical, and biological subjects. ”

“ In his several visits to Europe, he had seen and examined the materials from which most of the endemic American species of ferns were originally described, in so far as such materials are preserved, and also many foreign types with which American specimens had been identified — sometimes erroneously— by the earlier writers. ”