COULTER, JOHN MERLE (1851-1928), American bot anist, was born at Ningpo, China, on Nov. 20, 1851. He gradu ated at Hanover college, Hanover, Ind., in 187o and pursued further study there and at Indiana university, receiving from the latter in 1884 the degree of doctor of philosophy. After serving as botanist with the U.S. geological survey in the Rocky Mountains in 1872-73, he was professor of natural sciences in Hanover col lege in 1874-79, Professor of biology in Wabash college in 1879 91, president and professor of botany in Indiana university in and president of Lake Forest university in 1893-96. From 1896 to 1925 he was professor and head of the department of botany in the University of Chicago. In 1923 he was made a member of the national research council and in 1925 became ad viser of the Boyce Thompson institute of plant research at Yon kers, New York. For more than a half-century he was an active botanical investigator and educator, producing early in his career valuable manuals for the study of Rocky Mountain and Texan plants and later building up by his marked ability as a teacher and organizer an important graduate department in botany in which many leaders of plant research in America were trained. In he founded the Botanical Gazette, of which for more than So years he was editor. He died at Yonkers, N.Y., Dec. 23, 1928. His longer works include : Manual of Rocky Mountain Botany, with T. C. Porter (1885) ; Botany of Western Texas Plant Relations (1899) ; Plant Structures (1899) ; Morphology of Gymnosperms (I 90 1) and Morphology of Angiosperms (1903 ), both with C. J. Chamberlain ; New Manual of Botany of the Central Rocky Mountains, with A. Nelson (1909) ; Fundamentals of Plant Breeding (1914) ; Evolution of Sex in Plants 0914); Plant Genetics (1918) ; and When Evolution and Religion Meet, with Merle C. Coulter (1924)