32 MISSOURI BOTANICAL GARDEN BULLETIN 
is often not distinct from “garden” or “park,” and thus con- 
ceived it connotes merely an extensive plant display, ar- 
ranged perhaps both in the open and in plant houses. It 
may be assumed that the display is designed to give pleasing 
effects, to disseminate the type of information which mere 
contact with plants may afford, and perhaps to encourage cer- 
tain more serious studies. Exhibits of blossoming or foliage 
plants and displays of the natural groups of native and exotic 
floras are, indeed, an important part of the broad educational 
plan contemplated and carried out by modern scientific 
gardens, but this is not all. These collections of living plants 
facilitate instruction and stimulate research; but the serious 
study of the incompletely known life processes of plants, or © 
the attainment of a better knowledge of form and structure 
as a means of classification and further fundamental study, 
are necessarily conducted in special laboratories. 
In the broadest sense these laboratories must represent the 
possibility of using apparatus and chemicals, books and her- 
_ barium specimens, live material from garden or field and 
cultures of microscopic organisms. The laboratory method 
in physiological botany is distinctly experimental. Often the 
experimental work must be carried into the greenhouse and 
field, for we must grow plants if we are to know their require- 
ments. Since experimental work in laboratories became a 
feature of botanical instruction, fundamental scientific work 
has moved by leaps and bounds. Applied botany has profited 
correspondingly. 
Applied Botany.—The training which men have gained 
in the plant laboratory is that which has enabled them to 
work out so satisfactorily in recent years many of the im- 
portant problems in the plant industries, that is, in the appli- 
cation of botanical science to floriculture, to fruit culture and 
field work, to the encouragement of crop work under semi- 
arid conditions, to problems of soil fertility, to the prevention 
of plant diseases, and to numerous bacteriological problems. 
Nevertheless, immediate application of scientific work is not 
the chief end, for broad principles are necessary before accu- 
rate individual diagnosis is attainable. Applied botany de- 
serves always the fullest consideration and it likewise offers 
many of the most interesting problems of the day; thus the 
study of the bacteria and the determination of the function 
of the root “nodules” of the clover family has allayed all fear 
of a “nitrogen famine” in the soil, and the grower has a 
logical basis for the Milenio of crop rotation; scientifically 
a new conception of the relation of many lower organisms to. 
