82 The Plant W'okld. 



in the science of botany nor in its American environment is there 

 reason to fear its extinction. On the contrary there is every 

 reason for confident expectation of increasing prosperity. 



So far, however, American botany can not claim to have 

 been any more distinctive than American painting or American 

 music. It has produced no single figure who has discovered any 

 great new principle in Nature or who has established a school 

 unique in its pursuits as in its excellence. There have been, 

 and may now be, competent American botanists of all the well 

 known varieties, taxonomists, plant-geographers, morphologists, 

 cytologists, ecologists, physiologists; but there has developed 

 no variety distinctively American; there is no work which is 

 unique. At the same time that one may be inclined to deny 

 that American botanists are gregarious, reflection shows that 

 they are not so solitary as to be unalTected by botanical fashions 

 But even this trait is not peculiarly American, nor even pecu- 

 liarly scientific. It is none the less regrettable, however, for 

 while we are successfully metamorphosing from cytologists into 

 Mendelians, then into mutationists, then taking a broad sweep 

 as ecologists and having a fling as physiologists, we are losing, not 

 to say wasting, parts of a single brief life-time and accomplishing 

 less in fact than in printers' ink. There has alwa)'s been this 

 very human quality about American botanists. Tastes, cir- 

 cumstances, and the mode made them all collectors and de- 

 scribers of flowering plants in the early days of our science. 

 Now plant-breeding, in its various forms, is the latest generally 



* 



accepted fashion. 



There have been little time and little place in this young 

 country for the cultivation of sentimental botany. The first 

 settlers on the Atlantic coast, and the fringe of white men which 

 reached farther and farther westward, needed to know plants for 

 their uses, as yielding food, shelter, and medicine, . needed to 

 distinguish the injurious plants and those merely useless. Nat- 

 ural curiosity was sharpened by necessity. From the beginning, 

 the study of plants in this country has been strongly influenced 

 by the requirements of its inhabitants. The devotee of pure 

 science has found scant support and still less understanding 

 sympathy. We may deplore the fact, but we must recognize 

 its adetjuate and persisting cause. 



