78 BURTON EDWARD LIVINGSTON 



the beginner who hopes to devote his energies mainly to the study 

 of the existing relations between phenomena within and without 

 the plant. 



3. No very great progress toward a knowledge of causality can 

 be made by the study of qualitative relations; quantitative 

 descriptions of the phenomena involved and of their concomitant 

 relations must soon become requisite as advance is made. It 

 thus comes about that the main body of the activities of present- 

 day physiology has to deal with measurement. Furthermore, 

 quantitative description now frequently serves as an end in itself, 

 just as qualitative description once did; biometrics and floristics 

 are preeminently quantitative sciences, but they do not neces- 

 sarily imply any direct seeking of fundamental physical causes, 

 and phylogeny is rapidly becoming quantitative through the new 

 science of experimental evolution. Since heredity, with the con- 

 stancy and inconstancy of which qualitative evolution dealt, 

 was but a name for an exceedingly complex series of physiological 

 processes, it is not surprising that the new science of experimental 

 evolution or of inheritance should be rapidly becoming physiologi- 

 cal in its. methods. Upon the latter is being rapidly built up the 

 art of plant breeding, in which many of the findings of the science 

 immediately find application. 



This is the latest development of physiological study, to measure 

 and relate the untold conditions which are causally connected with 

 the numerous plant processes. That the future of this develop- 

 ment will furnish wonderful advances is assured. It is mainly in 

 this field that the demand for well-trained physiologists has so 

 strongly developed recently, and it is with quantitative problems 

 in physiology that our beginners in physiology should have to 

 concern themselves. 



SUGGESTED CRITERIA FOR THE JUDGING OF A PROPOSED 



PROBLEM 



1. From the above considerations we are forced to place at 

 the head of our list of requisites for a beginner's problem in 

 research, that it should be of a quantitatively etiological nature, 

 it should deal in a quantitative way with the causal conditions 



