(Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We h...)
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William Beal was born on March 11, 1833, at Adrian, Michigan, the son of a Quaker, William Beal, and of Rachel Comstock. Beal's was the day of homespun clothes, log houses, wooden plows, and this early environment made him through later life economical of time, equipment and energy, and tirelessly industrious. The waste of forests seen in his boyhood made him a conservationist, while his knowledge of the farm boy was invaluable to him in his teaching.
Education
William entered the University of Michigan with the class of 1859, and acquired a smattering of zoology and botany taught entirely from books. With the degree of A. B. he went to Union Springs, New York, in 1859, teaching till 1868. During vacations he studied at Harvard, where Agassiz took him in hand and made a thoroughgoing naturalist of him. Then Beal went to Asa Gray, who led him through systematic botany and what little was then known of the physiology and morphology of plants, converting him easily to the Darwinian theory of evolution. In 1865 he received his S. B. from Harvard, and in 1875 his M. S. from the old University of Chicago.
Career
William Beal went to teach botany at University of Chicago in 1868. In 1871 he began teaching at the Michigan Agricultural College, where he continued until his retirement in 1910. Beal is usually considered one of the three pioneers who grew up in the "old botany" and by their efforts helped to usher in the "new botany. " He probably did not produce so many botanists as did Bessey and Burrill, but his influence on the raw farm boy was on the side of science. He would drill his students for hours in the Latin names of plants, because he felt that they stood in need of formal training. But he was one with them in his homely use of proverbs and wise saws, the most characteristic of which was his "Keep on squintin', " which he gave to beginning students exasperated with microscopic scrutiny.
His publications are said to have numbered more than 1, 200. The New Botany (1881) had the greatest pedagogic influence. The Grasses of North America (2 vols. , 1887) in its first edition had to be published at the author's expense, but so great was its popularity among amateurs that it readily found a publisher for subsequent editions. Unfortunately for systematic botany, the book was full of inaccuracies and has thrown much confusion into the tangled nomenclature of the grasses. Seed Dispersal (1898) was also immensely popular, and scientifically sound. In The History of Michigan Agricultural College (1915) he gave historically valuable glimpses of the times.
In 1887 Beal procured legislation creating the Forestry Commission. He founded the college forest preserve in 1875 and in 1906 planted its "Pinetum. " To him the college owes its well-stocked botanical garden. He died in his sleep, after a paralytic stroke, at the home of his son-in-law, Ray Stannard Baker, at Amherst.
William Beal had three antipathies: for alcohol, tobacco, and quack-grass. One might add, as a fourth, hatred of idleness, for after his retirement, when too feeble to walk alone, he would sit and saw up firewood.
Connections
William Beal's wife was a childhood friend, Hannah Proud, whom he married September 2, 1863.