Due to a lack of faculty, Beal taught a wide range of subjects. In addition to teaching his passion of botany, he also taught English, history, and civil engineering. His successor at the Michigan Agricultural College, P.G. Holden, is quoted as praising Beal’s work by saying “From his original experiment has come to the Twentieth Century Miracle - hybrid corn.” Beal founded MSU's W. J. Beal Botanical Garden in 1877, making it the oldest continuously operated botanical garden in the United States. Beal's work was inspired by many influential scientists of the late 19th century. He arrived at Harvard to complete an undergraduate degree 3 years after Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species. Emerson, Lowell, and Holmes were writing and lecturing, and Thoreau was still alive. Beal heard them all as a young student from Michigan. Groundbreaking research by Darwin and the writings of Emerson, Lowell, Holmes, and Thoreau were probably inspirations to a young Beal as he transitioned from studying at Harvard to conducting his research at the Michigan Agricultural College. Darwin’s research on inheritance especially seems to have influenced Beal’s development of hybrid corn. In 1887, he and Professor Rolla C. Carpenter created "Collegeville", the first neighborhood in what later became East Lansing. Germination experiment In 1879 Beal started one of the longest-running experiments in botany. He filled 20 bottles with a mixture of sand and seeds, with each bottle containing 50 seeds from 21 species of plant. Then the bottles were buried, their necks pointing down to exclude water. The goal of the experiment was to unearth one of the bottles every five years, plant the seeds, and observe the number that would sprout. Later caretakers extended the experiment by opening a bottle once every decade, and later, every two decades. A bottle was unearthed in 2000, and 2 of the 21 plant species sprouted. The experiment is still running, with the bottles buried on the campus of Michigan State University. The end of the study is due in 2100. The most recent bottle was unearthed on April 15, 2021. Published works He was the author of The New Botany (1882), Grasses of North America (1887), Seed Dispersal (1898) and History of Michigan Agricultural College (1915). Quotation "Merely learning the name of a plant or parts of a plant can no longer be palmed off as valuable training." As published in The Examiner of Hartford, Conn,