thing outside of the circle of that systematic botany which deals only in nomenclature."
This rebuke did not pass without effect. A student of Schleiden's, the honored anatomist, Hermann Schacht, taught how to identify the commoner fibers used in spinning by microscopical characters. Soon from Austria strong impulse and effective work appeared along these lines, where, by the' use of methods of investigation practiced by plant anatomists, the foundation was laid for technical microscopy and the technical study of raw material in the plant kingdom, which two studies were first placed in the curriculum of the technical high schools of Austria.
Through the use of plant physiology in questions of practical life this science came to be an aid in the administration of justice. The courts request from plant physiologists as from chemists professional opinions, and more than once has the botanical institute of our university been in a position to respond to the requests of the court.
Botany, as is well known, came early to be a strong aid in the medical science, which encouraged not plant physiology but systematic botany—in fact, called it into existence. What the diggers of roots and herb dealers in the Grecian age began, Hippocrates and other Grecian physicians continued, namely, the search for plants with healing qualities, the naming and distinguishing of which appeared in the most thoroughly collaborated materia medica of Dioscorides. Until the period of the reawakening of the arts and sciences, this work formed the chief source of botanical knowledge. The repayment of this great debt of botany to medical science was made, however, not so much by the immediate debtor—systematic botany—but chiefly through plant physiology. Let the science of medicine always remember that the subject of bacteriology, now become so important, owes its origin to botanists. It was not merely that bacteria were first differentiated by botanists, it was likewise a botanist, the late Ferdinand Cohn, director of the Institute for Plant Physiology in Breslau, who first recognized bacteria as the cause of diseases. It was he, also, who originated the well known generic names of bacilli, micrococci, and bacteria. What importance bacteriology has come to assume in the diagnosis and etiology of disease, for hygiene, and other branches of medicine is generally known.
Likewise those branches of plant culture which gave the first impulse toward the establishment of plant physiology have in turn been richly repaid for all the suggestions and usable facts which they furnished. Agriculture, forestry, and horticulture are to-day permeated by the spirit of plant physiology, and what these practical studies have gained in scientific insight is for the most part due to plant physiology. It must be said also that agricultural chemistry has contributed materially to the principles of plant culture, but the one-
