THE PRINCIPLES OF SEED-TESTING 



BY T. JOHNSON, D.Sc. 



Professor of Botany in the Royal College of Science, Dublin 



While botany, like other subjects of study, will always have its 

 followers who pursue it for its own sake, or because of the in- 

 crease of knowledge of Nature its successful prosecution brings, 

 there are others who through taste or other cause devote them- 

 selves to botany from the applied or economic point of view. 

 The magnificent work done by the English botanists in the 

 nineteenth century was due, in large measure, as Sir J. Hooker 

 himself once told me, to the demands of people at home and 

 abroad for information as to the nature and uses of the plants 

 forming the flora of our newly acquired colonies. It was, on the 

 other hand, the absence of colonies before 1880 which helped to 

 produce the splendid results in anatomical and physiological 

 botany for which Germany became famous. 



There are two branches of economic botany, the foundations 

 of which have been laid practically within the last fifty years — 

 that bearing on plant diseases or plant-pathology, and that of 

 seed-testing. 



It may not be out of place here for me, as a former student 

 and teacher of the Royal College of Science, London, to call 

 attention to what appears to a botanist a peculiar lack of appre- 

 ciation of the modern developments of botany in the hesitation 

 shown as to the future of the Biological Division, in the Report of 

 the Committee on that College's conversion into a more strictly 

 technical or applied College of Science. If the Committee were 

 familiar with the beneficial work carried out in Germany by 

 Frank, Hartig, Von Tubeuf, Aderhold, etc., in the Biological 

 Institutes of Berlin, Munich, and Hamburg, and in France by 

 Prillieux and Delacroix, etc., there would surely be no inclination 

 to suppress the Biological Division, but rather to develop it 

 along economic lines. Even if there were no ordinary students 

 this division could make an ample return for all expenditure 



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