Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/338

322 library of the university, containing two hundred thousand volumes, in an hour or two. Outside the laboratories lies a garden stocked with an immense variety of well-grown plants representing great diversities of form and habitat, and presenting suitable material for the solution of a number of the more important open questions in the subject. Stretching away on every hand is the rich flora of the limestone hills, crested by coniferous forests. The subalpine vegetation of the Swabian Alps may also be reached by an excursion of a few kilometres.

The forests, lying within half an hour's walk of the garden, embrace examples of the royal, communal, and private systems

of management, and afford splendid opportunities for study in dendrology.

The most valuable part of the worker's experience, with such ample facilities at hand, however, is that which comes from the advice, encouragement, and suggestions of the director. Constantly engaged in the most laborious research for more than a quarter of a century, he has a vivid and sympathetic appreciation of the difficulties which beset the investigator, and his keen insight into the physiology of plant life leads him quickly to the solution of the problem in hand. His time and patience are unstintingly given to any who may have the slightest claim upon them, and the many times repeated assertion that the German professor gives a minor portion of his time only to his students is certainly ungrounded here. The writer is not acquainted with any American laboratory for botany in which the professor in charge devotes a greater proportion of his time to the student. In earlier times the Tübingen professors carried