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Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/331

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BOTANIC GARDENS.
315

losophy in 1805. At this time the garden was removed to its present location, on the banks of the Ammer, in the northwestern part of the city, and shortly cold and warm houses for plants and a residence for the university gardener were erected. Kielmeyer was succeeded by Schubler in 1817, and he in turn by Hugo von Mohl in 1835.

It would be difficult to overestimate the value of the work accomplished by von Mohl during the thirty-seven years (1835 to 1872) in which he was professor of botany at Tübingen. This period does not include the entire time of his activity in this place, however. In 1826 the faculty of medicine offered a prize for an essay on the nature of tendrils and climbing plants, and a thesis by von Mohl, who was then a student, won the prize. This academic essay, written at the age of twenty-two, remained the clearest presentation of the subject until it was taken up by the elder Darwin in 1865. During the half century in which he was

Hermann Vöchting (sitting, facing front) and Group of Workers in Botanic Institute in Summer of 1896; Professor of Botany and Director of the Botanic Garden since 1887. After a photograph.

a leading figure in the botanical world, he used a purely inductive method of research, and by a long series of many-times repeated observations established manifold phenomena and facts which he welded into a coherent mass by a logic so relentless that he was incapable of being led astray into fanciful theories and dazzling speculations. Such a method enabled him to take a prominent part in the destruction of the chimerical teaching of the nature