Plant Science Bulletin 58(3) 2012 interest was in teaching botany (taxonomy), and he was concerned that no proper textbook was available. In Wood’s view, two major problems existed with Phelps’ Lessons in Botany. First, she spent too much time covering basic structure and function, nearly 300 pages, with only 220 devoted to the flora. Second, Phelps still was devoted to the Linnaean system, and Wood, like Gray, understood that the natural system was more appropriate. On the other hand, Gray’s Elements of Botany (1836) did not include a flora, and his The Botanical Textbook (1842), like Phelps’ text, devoted only about 40% of its pages to the flora. Wood understood that he had meager botanical training even though he was a devoted amateur plant collector. For this reason, he tried unsuccessfully to convince morequalified botanists to prepare a suitable textbook for secondary schools that would include a manual of the plants of the Northeast. Among those he approached was Gray himself. “Wood has called on me twice. He will I dare say produce something rather respectable—much better than anything of the Mrs. Lincoln school….that his work may do good, I dare say—though the better it prove, the more it will affect my own interest. But the field is freely open, and I wish him heartily all the success his book may deserve” (Gray, 1844). Gray was indeed prescient. Wood’s book was easy to read (compare a reading index of 14, today’s college sophomore, with the graduate school reading level of Gray’s textbook in Table 2), inexpensive, and devoted more than 500 of its 645 pages to the natural system of classification. His illustrations were comparable to those found in Phelps. The first edition of 1500 privately printed copies sold out immediately, and a Boston publishing house quickly produced an additional 3000 copies (Lyon, 1945). Wood had begun to make his mark challenging the established authors. In the preface of the first edition, he stated his teaching philosophy: That there is need of a new Class-Book of Botany, prepared on the basis of the present advanced state of the science, and, at the same time, adapted to the circumstances of the mass of students collected in our institutions and seminaries of learning, is manifest to all who now attempt either to teach or to learn. The time has arrived when Botany should no longer be presented to the learner encumbered with the puerile misconceptions and barren facts of the old school, but as a System of Nature, raised by recent researches to the dignity and rank of a science founded upon
Figure 3. Alphonso Wood. (Image in public domain.) the principles of inductive philosophy...; That theory of the floral structure which refers each organ to the principles of the leaf, long since propounded in Germany by the poet Goethe, and recently admitted by authors generally to be coincident with facts, is adopted, of course, in the present work. His textbook featured a simple key to classes that led to orders (our families), each of which had its own key to genera. Each genus had a generalized description, including vegetative as well as floral characteristics. Species were listed alphabetically, and each species entry included the common name and a complete English description, again including vegetative as well as floral parts in addition to time of flowering. “Without the talents nor the advantages of Gray, [Alphonso Wood] competed successfully in the textbook field” (Ewan, 1969, p. 44). Within a few years of its appearance, Wood’s Class-book eliminated Eaton’s market and severely cut into Phelps’. In 1845 Gray himself complained to Torrey “…Wood is just taking the market, against my ‘Botanical Textbook,’ mostly by means of his ‘Flora’.” The reasons are apparent from the testaments published at the end of Wood’s text (1853)—the lack of a suitable flora was just one reason.
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