An Unusual Book

Don't judge me by my cover

Not all old books are valuable, any more than all old violins with the name Stradivarius were made by the master, and while some old, valuable books wear their worth on their covers, others lie quietly in nondescript bindings, awaiting discovery. Would this book catch your eye? Something about its size made me pick it up. I looked at the title, laid it down, picked it up again, and finally, thought, Botany--well, that's always interesting--without ever looking inside. It was a sale. The books were cheap. What could I lose? And so I came to own The Evolution and Distribution of Flowering Plants, by John Muirhead MacFarlane, published in Philadelphia in 1933.

Days later, unloading my box of "new" old books, I opened this unprepossessing volume and, to my delight, found an inscription by the author:

Author's inscription

An author's signature always makes a book more interesting. Looking further, I found two foldout sheets showing (separately--one shown below) the branching evolution of the plant families treated in the work. 

Diagram of plant family

More and more intrigued, I poked around on the Internet for information about MacFarlane. According to a source lacking citations or references. he was born in 1855 in Scotland, near the Firth of Forth, educated in Scotland, and taught at the University of Edinburgh before emigrating in 1893. At the University of Pennsylvania he taught botany and played a key role in establishing the botanical garden. He died in 1943. About Mr. Katsumi I have been able thus far to learn nothing, having little to go on beyond his family name. Presumably he was at least interested in botany. 

But here is the icing on the bibliocake, as it were:

Author's hope

On the book's title page, in the same ink and same hand as the inscription, the author added a note of clarification. The present volume covers only two families in the plant kingdom, and thus MacFarlane calls it "Volume I." He was 78 years of age when this volume was published. Did he hope to complete the work or that other botanists would take it up and pursue it to conclusion? In his preface, he calls this book a "set of preliminary studies."

The fashion for tracing evolution of species from sample plants had its heyday in the nineteenth century. (Another of MacFarlane's works in evolution and distribution has to do with "fishes" and is much easier to find than this book on plants.) In our own time, interest has shifted to the cellular level and below, with scientists relying on DNA samples to pinpoint biological origins and migratory paths around the globe. And yet, how painstaking and laborious must have been this author's work, how passionate his devotion, and how fond the hopes he cherished!