EDITOR'S NOTE TO THE FIRST EDITION 



The German edition of this book has gained many friends in institutions 

 where plant physiology is taught and has supplied a need for elementary students 

 not otherwise met. Its small size, together with its generally excellent arrange- 

 ment and manner of presentation render it very well suited to the use of begin- 

 ning students who really desire to obtain a general grasp of the subject in a 

 comparatively short time. Its brevity, its conciseness and the readableness of 

 its story are its first attractions, but a further examination reveals the facts that 

 Palladin has been exceptionally thorough in much of his treatment, and that a 

 wealth of well-chosen citations from the literature of plant physiology places 

 in the reader's hands a ready guide to original sources. In the latter regard the 

 text-books originating in our own language are usually deficient, thereby depriv- 

 ing the student of one of his most important rights at the very start— the right 

 to appreciate that the key to the science he is entering really lies in its literature, 

 contributed to by many hundreds of serious workers writing in many languages. 



Palladin approaches the subject from the point of view of a student of physio- 

 logical chemistry, and it is the chemical aspects of plant physiology that here 

 receive greatest emphasis. Most workers in the science will doubtless agree 

 that this is an excellent method of approach. One who has read the book under- 

 standingly should be able to plan his own further development, with the aid of 

 the current journals and other contributions, and he will hardly miss the main 

 general idea of present-day physiology, that the future of the subject must rest 

 largely in the development and application of the technique and methods of 

 thinking that characterize the more fundamental sciences of chemistry and 



physics. 



If the German translation has proved to be well suited to the use of serious 

 elementary students, it follows that they should make use of it. Here, however, 

 lies a difficulty. It appears to be the present fashion for graduates of American 

 colleges to be able to really read only the English language, so that the drudgery 

 of virtually digging their way through a German text militates strongly against 

 their becoming familiar with the subject-matter involved ; they are apt to fail to 

 grasp the ideas because of a sort of blind struggle to understand the language. 

 This being all too commonly the case, those who take up plant physiology or its 

 applications need, especially, just such a short and scientific treatise as Palladin's 

 book offers, but they need it in their own language, so that they may revert to it 

 now and again without distraction. In this way the student's physiological 

 habits of thought may continue to advance steadily while he is learning to read 

 the foreign tongues that will be requisite for his future work. It was to fill this 

 sort of need among students aiming to make some branch of plant physiology 

 their specialty that an English translation of the German edition was originally 



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