Science: Plant Hunter

In the 1880s, Alfred Russell' Wallace, great British biologist who originated independently the theory of natural selection at the same time as Charles Darwin, visited the U. S. He lectured at a small agricultural college in Kansas, stayed at the house of the college president. One student who listened to him with particularly wide-eyed wonder was the president's son, David Fairchild, who had already resolved to be a botanist, was studying parasitic fungi and the wind-borne movements of Kansas tumbleweed.

After Wallace's unforgettable visit, David's Uncle Byron, a botanist, took him to...