Abstract
PROF. JOHN MTJIRHEAD MACFARLANE, emeritus professor of botany in the University of Pennsylvania, died at his home in Philadelphia a few weeks ago. He was born in Kirkcaldy in 1855, and his work was over more than twenty years ago. One or two old friends still remember him when he and they were boys in Edinburgh, where he learned his botany from “Woody Fibre” and from Alexander Dickson, and became one of Bayley Balfour's first assistants. It was under Balfour's influence that he wrote his once well-known paper on the minute structure of plant hybrids, which remained perhaps his chief work to the end. It was a careful comparison, within the histological limitations of its day, between the tissues of various hybrids and their parents, in such curious cases as the so-called Philageria (that is, Lapageria x Philesia) Veitchii, and the famous 'graft-hybrid', Cytisus Adami. This investigation led to his first appointment in the University of Pennsylvania in 1892, and gained him the Banksian Medal of the Royal Horticultural Society a little later on. His old master Dickson had been interested in pitcher-plants, and the Edinburgh Garden was rich in these, in cluding the rare little Cephalotus and many hybrid Sarracenias and other things. Macfarlane had a note in NATURE on honey-glands in pitcher-plants, nearly sixty years ago. Long afterwards he did the pitcher - plants for various Floras, including those of British North Borneo and of New Guinea, and he wrote the chapters on Nepenthes, Sarracenia and Cephalotus for Engler. He was a very faithful and a very industrious man.
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THOMPSON, D. Prof. J. M. Macfarlane. Nature 152, 471 (1943). https://doi.org/10.1038/152471a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/152471a0