Part 44

There are many broad philosophical questions which have found an appropriate home in the Journal, such as “The Plant-individual in its relation to the species” (Alexander Braun, =19=, 297, 1855; =20=, 181, 1855), and “The analogy between the mode of reproduction in plants and the alternation of generations observed in some radiata” (J. D. Dana, =10=, 341, 1850). Akin to these are many of the reflections which one finds scattered throughout the pages of the Journal, frequently in minor book notices. As might be expected, some attention has been paid to the very special branch of botany which is strictly called medical. For example, early in its history, the Journal published a long treatise by Dr. William Tully (=2=, 45, 1820), on the ergot of rye. This is considered from a structural as well as from a medical point of view and is decidedly ahead of the time in which it was written. There are a few references to vegetable poisons, and there is a fascinating account of the effect of the common white ash on the activities of the rattlesnake. In short it may be said that the editor did much towards making the Journal readable as well as strictly scientific.

The list of reviewers who have been permitted to use the pages of the Journal for notices of botanical and allied books in recent years is pretty long. One finds the initials of Wesley R. Coe, George P. Clinton, Arthur L. Dean, Alexander W. Evans, William G. Farlow, George L. Goodale, Arthur H. Graves, Herbert E. Gregory, Lafayette B. Mendel, Leo F. Rettger, Benjamin L. Robinson, George R. Wieland, and others.

At the present time, in the biological sciences, as in every department of thought, there is great specialization, and each specialty demands its own private organ of publication. Naturally this has led to a falling off in the botanical communications to the Journal, but it cannot be forgotten that the history of North American Botany has been largely recorded in its pages.

_Notes._

Footnote 184:

Scientific Papers of Asa Gray. Selected by Charles Sprague Sargent. Two volumes, Boston, 1889 (see notice in vol. 38, 419, 1889).

Footnote 185:

A notice of Gray’s life and works is given by his life-long friend, J. D. Dana, in the Journal in 1888 (=35=, 181–203).

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

1. Typos fixed; non-standard spelling and dialect retained. 2. Used numbers for footnotes. 3. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_. 4. Enclosed bold or blackletter font in =equals=. 5. The caret (^) serves as a superscript indicator, applicable to individual characters (like 2^d) and even entire phrases (like 1^{st}). 6. Subscripts are shown using an underscore (_) with curly braces { }, as in H_{2}O.