464 PEATTIE 



ness and a desire to be helpful, but he never quite mastered true populariza- 

 tion. Perhaps his difficulties may be summed up in the remark he once made 

 to me when I took him an article I had written and asked him to read it 

 over for errors. In due course he returned it to me and (he was the most 

 ceremoniously courteous of botanists) was so good as to say "No, no errors, 

 Peattie. But I see you couldn't resist the temptation to be interesting." 



If you can bring yourself to yield to this temptation, then practically the 

 whole field of botany lies open to you. It has only been superficially touched 

 here and there. I suggest as a challenge to those teaching botanists who regard 

 a knowledge of plant physiology as the backbone of every introductory course 

 and the indispensable prerequisite to any further knowledge that they try 

 popularizing their subject. By that I mean writing a book for out-of -college 

 adults, that a publisher will publish, or an article that so fascinates the editor 

 of a magazine as to make him reach for his voucher pad. In fact I can think 

 of only two occasions when this has been done with even partial success — an 

 article by Charles D. Stewart in The Atlantic Monthly, April, 1929, entitled 

 "The Tree as an Invention" and a book. This Green World (1942), by Ruther- 

 ford Piatt who is a businessman who never took a botanical course in all the 

 years he was at Yale. 



Perhaps (this is a dreadful thing to say and I am going to regret it as 

 soon as I've said it) this was almost an advantage, for Mr. Piatt didn't and 

 perhaps still doesn't know too much about his subject. Many editors have 

 found that if you invite the great Professor Whatzisname to write on his 

 life-long specialty, he is apt to choke up, cannot get out what he knows, 

 despises his audience, and above all cannot submit himself to the discipline 

 of brevity. Possibly, too, he is very weary of his subject, with which he has 

 lived and slept for thirty years. He may not know that, but the editor and 

 reader hear the sound of weariness, the a-hemming of the strained voice. It 

 might do him good to be a smatter-artist for a few years. He might write 

 more freshly if you could sidetrack him with a sudden new hobby in another 

 aspect of botany. 



Again, I'd like to suggest to the morphologists, some of whom consider 

 themselves the salt of the botanical earth, that they try popularizing their 

 subject. I recall asking one of them what it is that makes wood beautiful. He 

 frowned before saying "Why, the grain, I suppose," but then, reflecting that 

 the word "grain" has no precise meaning, he corrected himself, and dismissed 

 me by suggesting that I ask them over in the Esthetics Department. Plainly 

 it was not, he considered, a subject that a sound plant morphologist should 

 even be caught thinking upon. Ah, but it is, my late and much revered friend, 

 it is! If you were alive today I would recommend to you an article entitled 

 "Why Wood Is Beautiful," by George N. Lamb, in American Forests for 

 May, 1938. For there are very good morphological reasons to explain the 

 burning-bush type of crotch figure, the crotch and swirl figure, the plum- 



