Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 70.djvu/521

Rh possible than now for botanists themselves to extend their studies afield and learn the flora in its native heath and study it in its associations and in its relations to soil, temperature, moisture and climate. Among these early field botanists was Charles Wright, who explored Texas, New Mexico and Nicaragua, and all through the period of our civil war and later spent his years in Cuba and made known the flora that its native and introduced Spanish inhabitants had ever been expecting to study themselves in their glorious mañana, the never-appearing period when this race does its leading work. Wright with his boyish spirit was Dr. Gray's 'Carlo,' a name given not only in sport, but seriously embalmed among plant names in Gray's genus Carlowrightia. Then there were Fendler and Lindheimer, both German-Americans, who collected in Texas and New Mexico, and Fendler later in Panama, Venezuela, and last of all in Trinidad, where he died in 1883. There was also the old Pathfinder, Fremont, who made collections in California and over the Oregon trail; and Parry, quiet, open-hearted, the type of the sincere botany man, who ranged over the great west from his home in Iowa to the Mexican boundary and the golden gate of the Pacific. Later, Lemmon explored the high Sierras and Arizona, and Brandegee, led on from his surveys of the Denver and Rio Grande, left engineringengineering [sic] for botany and explored from the Great Basin to the lowest confines of Baja California. Both of these were followed by the veteran collector, Pringle, who finding Arizona and California too small for his ambitions, traveled year after year throughout Mexico from Chihuahua to Tehuantepec. Time forbids the mention of the many others, even by name, who, in their untiring zeal for botanical exploration, not unlike those mentioned by the sacred writer, "subdued kingdoms. . . quenched the violence of fire, escaped the edge of the sword. . . out of weakness were made strong. . . wandered about in sheep-skins and goat skins. . . of whom the world was not worthy." To these botanical explorers we owe a debt of profound gratitude.