Abstract
ALL botanists and lovers of flowers will mourn the death of the Edinburgh professor, who served science and horticulture as few men have ever done. The occasion seems opportune to relate an incident comparatively unimportant in itself but in a manner typical. Many years ago a beautiful Primula, called by Greene P. rusbyi, was discovered in the Mogollon Mountains of New Mexico. Later, in the Sandia Mountains of the same State, one of my students found an apparently distinct species, which I named P. ellisiæ. These primroses occupied distinct and isolated mountain ranges, but were so similar, at least in the herbarium, that a German writer pronounced them identical. No one, so far as could be learned, had seen more than one of them alive, and it was the living plants we needed to settle the matter. I was able to procure seeds of P. ellisiæ for Prof. Bayley Balfour, and in 1921, when my wife and I visited him in Edinburgh, he not only had ellisiæ in full flower, but also rusbyi, the seeds of which he had secured from some other collector. It was a dramatic moment when the Professor held the two pots, one in each hand, and pointed out that the plants were quite distinct. Thus, in Edinburgh, we learned a lesson in New Mexico botany, which we had never been able to learn when resident for years in that region. No doubt others could relate parallel experiences.
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COCKERELL, T. Sir Isaac Bayley Balfour. Nature 111, 150 (1923). https://doi.org/10.1038/111150a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/111150a0
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