A QUARTER-CENTURY OF GROWTH IN PLANT 



PHYSIOLOGY! 



BURTON EDWARD LIVINGSTON 

 The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland 



Introduction. The two and one-half decades during which 

 the University of Chicago has achieved the remarkable de- 

 velopment that we are here to celebrate, have witnessed a 

 goodly number of notable changes in the status of botanical 

 science in general, but I think no branch of that science has 

 taken longer strides within this interval of time than has plant 

 physiology. It appears that the continuation of this advance 

 may be accelerated if we take some time, now and then, on such 

 occasions as the present one, to pass in review what seem to be 

 the lasting achievements of the past, and to face squarely what 

 seem to be the general needs of the future. To study the 

 happenings of the past as these may be related to one another, 

 seems to offer the only known method upon which rational pre- 

 diction may be founded, and the planning of future researches 

 in our science must depend increasingly upon such prediction. 



A period of popularizatio7i. The period in question has been 

 characteristically one of the popularization of natural science 

 in. general, at least among the peoples that have been most 

 active in scientific progress. Thanks to increasing education 

 and to the printing of books and papers, the great principles 

 and discoveries, and even much of the philosophy, of science 

 have spread .outward, from their sources in the minds of scientists, 

 so that utter ignorance of these things is now comparatively 

 rare, even among those who do not deal directly with science 

 at all. Gravitation, magnetism, chemical reaction, evolution, 

 the mineral nutrition of plants, fermentation by microorganisms — 



^Invitation paper read at the Botanical Session of the Quarter Centennial 

 of the University of Chicago, June 6, 1916. 



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THE PLANT WORLD. VOL. 20, NO. 1 

 JANUARY, 1917 



