Botany

WHAT is the content and scope of the science of botany Popular opinion will answer somewhat easily Botany consists in the gathering of plants, and the dismembering of them, in connection with the use of a complicated ter- minology. That is the beginning and end of botany as it is understood by the majority there is nothing more to be said. In consequence, the employment of the botanist seems so trivial, so very remote from important human interests that no second thought is given to it. The con- ception formed in ignorance is continued in ignorance. Even the zoologist is at an advantage, for the public is finally forced to admit that it does not know what he is about, while it understands the botanist very well. He is quite hopeless, for, while flowers may be pretty things to pick, they should not be pulled to pieces, and if he does not happen to be interested in dissecting flowers he is not a botanist but simply a fraud. Far from being remote, the study of plants comes very close to human interests. One has but to stop to think that plants are the great energy source for man himself and the animals upon which his well-being depends, to recognize that a careful study of their manner of life, the conditions which favor or hinder their growth is of the very first importance. Besides this, human curiosity demands that plants be investigated, if for no other reason than that they must be made to yield answers to the per- 5 petual questions that man is asking regarding the world about him. Under botany we have to consider all the questions as to the form, the functions, the classification and the dis- tribution of those organisms that are called plants. Along what lines this study isprosecuted, how it is related to other fields of intellectual activity, and some specific in- stances of its problems and the manner in which they may be solved is what I shall attempt to tell you. It would be out of place in a talk like this to devote too much time to a consideration of the historical side of the subject, and therefore only a few of the important move- folk which had so far ments can be pointed out. Any emerged from the stage of savagery as to stop to notice the world about it would perforce pay some attention to plants. A discrimination of the medicinal uses of plants is often noticeable even in primitive peoples, and with such observation goes also the discrimination of difference in form, the prototype of morphological research. I have seen a Malay coolie who could distinguish seven forms of tropical oaks where the botanist recognizes only four, an evidence that sharp observation is not confined to the highly developed races. In our own civilization, we can trace back the history of botany to Aristotle, who affords us some record of the plant forms known at his time, though the influence which his philosophy wielded, evendown to the middle of the last century, was of vastly greater importance than any contribution which he made to botany itself. Theophrastus gave a fuller account of plants, and later came the inquiring and ever curious Pliny. Dioscorides, however, in the first or second century of our era, was one of the first to investigate plants with any attempt at thoroughness even from the standpoint of the knowledge of the time. As is shown especially by Dioscorides work, the study of 6 plants was largely from their use as drugs, and they were described simplyto facilitate their recognition...