Abstract
THE death on February 3 of Samuel Record at the age of sixty-three will be keenly felt by people all over the world who are interested in wood, for, if the name of any one individual deserves to be specially associated with the great revival of interest in wood anatomy during the past quarter of a century, it is his. He very early realized the possibilities of the then unknown woody species of the tropics and the fundamental importance of the wood sample backed by adequate herbarium material. When, therefore, he was appointed professor of forest products at Yale in 1917, he set out to build up a collection of timbers that was to become by far the most important collection in the world. What was perhaps equally important was that he deliberately aimed at making the collection available to any genuine research worker in any part of the world. A deep and sincere desire to further the general cause of wood anatomy in any way that he could was characteristic of him and partly explains his world-wide popularity. Much that he did to this end by means of encouragement, and advice must disappear with him; but he leaves-as more permanent memorials at least two of the-instruments he used for carrying out this policy, the journal Tropical Woods, which he founded in 1925 and edited until he died, and the International Association of Wood Anatomists, for the creation of which he was very largely responsible and of which he was the first secretary-treasurer.
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CHALK, L. Prof. Samuel J. Record. Nature 155, 627 (1945). https://doi.org/10.1038/155627a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/155627a0