We need to know the species of plants our fair land possesses, and have them described and named. But when the nine hundred and ninety-nine are known, it is a waste of time to be continually hunting for the thousandth. Look for it, but let it be secondary to that of an actual study of the great majority already known. The older botany was a study of the dried plants in all those details that are laid down in the manuals. It lacked something of the true vitality that is inherent in a biological science, for often the life had gone out before the subject came up for study. To the phytoecologist it was somewhat as the shell without the meat, or the bird's nest of a previous year. Since those days of our forefathers there has come the minute anatomy of plants, followed closely by physiology; and now with the working knowledge of these two modern branches of botany the student has again taken to the field. He is making the wood-lot his laboratory, and the garden, so to say, his lecture room. He has a fair knowledge of systematic botany, but finds himself rearranging the families and genera to fit the facts determined by his ecological study. If two species of the same genus are widely separated in habitat, he is determining the factors that led to the separation. Why did one smart weed become a climber, another an upright herb, and a third a prostrate creeper, are questions that may not have entered the mind of the plant collector; but now the phytoecologist finds much interest in considering questions of this type. What are the differences between a species inhabiting the water and another of the same genus upon dry land, or what has led one group of the morning-glory family to become parasites and exist as the dodders upon other living plants? The older botanist held his subject under the best mental illumination of his time, but his physical light, that of a pine knot or a tallow dip, also contrasts strongly with that of the present gas jet and electric arc.