Background

Charles Reid Barnes was born on September 7, 1858, in Madison, Jefferson County.

Education

From the first his interest in nature was strong, and his studies, prosecuted with a single-minded thoroughness, took him to Hanover College, from which he was graduated with the degree of A. B. in 1877. During his years at Hanover he was a classmate of Dr. John Merle Coulter, subsequently head of the department of botany at the University of Chicago, and thus began a lifelong friendship between the two.

During the summers of 1879 and 1880 he studied at Harvard under Asa Gray, then the acknowledged leader of American botany, whose work, though largely systematic, was nevertheless original in its day in the stress laid upon the science, then new, of vegetable physiology. Barnes returned to Hanover to gain his degree of M. A. in 1880, and then taught natural science at Purdue University, where he was promoted to a professorship in 1882. In 1887 he took his Ph. D. at Hanover.

Career

Barnes was principal of the High School at Hanover, 1877-78, principal of the High School at Utica, Indiana, 1878-79, and a teacher in the High School at Lafayette, Indiana, 1879-80. In 1887 he accepted a teaching post at the University of Wisconsin. This he left in 1898 to become plant physiologist with the University of Chicago, then just organizing, where he remained until his death from apoplexy twelve years later. Barnes's achievements were not in the more spectacular botanical field in which older botanists worked, that of exploration and the description of new species. On the contrary, in his labors the laboratory and its precise equipment, the mechanistic view-point, and the experimental method superseded the observational attitude of the older naturalists.

Interest in physiology as the chief aspect of botany was largely created by his text-books and by his great influence over the host of teachers who went forth from the University of Chicago in the first decade of this century. As co-editor, with Dr. Coulter, of the Botanical Gazette during its most influential years, Barnes established, by his interest in physiology, his passion for scientific precision, and his love of good English, the high standing of the magazine, and largely imparted to it its physiological and morphological emphasis. In his position as a critic and as a teacher of teachers, he upheld a rigidly high standard and in his thought was relentlessly severe and logical. His earliest work was his "Analytical Key to the Genera of Mosses" (Purdue University Bulletin, 1886), followed by other works with similar titles, that were essentially improved editions of the first, in which he for the first time removed the systematic study of mosses from a highly technical sphere, going as far to popularize the Bryophytes as Asa Gray the flowering plants and Eaton the ferns. In collaboration with J. M. Coulter and others he prepared several text-books which have been of great pedagogic influence on the experimental and morphological method of botanical instruction.

Achievements

• His most famous papers were on the status of modern botanical research, on the progress of plant physiology, and on the theory of the ascent of water in trees, a problem peculiarly fascinating.

Works

More photos

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  • Catalogue of the Phaenogamous and Vascular Cryptogamous Plants of Indiana

    (Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We h...)

  • The Progress And Problems Of Plant Physiology

    ( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)

  • Outlines of Plant Life: With Special Reference to Form and Function 1900

    (Originally published in 1900. This volume from the Cornel...)

  • A Textbook of Botany for College and Universities : Volume One - Morphology

Membership

He became a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1884 and a fellow in 1885.

Connections

classmate:

Dr. John Merle Coulter

Friend:

Asa Gray