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ON THE POPULARIZATION OF BOTANY 



Donald Culross Peattie 



... art thou officer? 



Or art thou base, common and popular? 



— Shakespeare, King Henry V. 



How to attract more young students to the study of botany was the an- 

 nounced subject of one session of botanists who met in December of 1924 

 in Washington, D.C. I attended because I was just then quitting the ranks 

 of professional botanists for free-lance writing as a popularizer. But no one 

 in that gathering of intellects there in a classroom of the Central High School 

 (empty of students over the Christmas holidays) proffered any ideas on the 

 subject. They appeared, rather, to be reading into the record (as Congressmen 

 say) miscellaneous matters which they wished to impress on other botanists 

 or merely to get off their chests. Others, looking very wise, said nothing. But 

 they were all, I felt, boring each other exquisitely, and when the gavel fell 

 to signal the end of a futile session, there was an almost undignified rush 

 for the door. As the youngest person in the room, I allowed my betters to 

 precede me. Then I looked back at the high-school classroom. Give botany 

 a wide miss, kids, I thought, until botanists can do better by you than they 

 did by each other here today. 



When I was invited by the American Journal of Botany to submit this 

 paper, with the suggestion that it was hoped that some intelligent high-school 

 student (among others), coming on the Golden Jubilee number, might be 

 induced by it to turn to botany for a life work, I remembered that long-ago 

 non-meeting of great minds in Washington. 



It is not my intent or business to tell botany teachers how to run their 

 courses, still less to suggest that they could make them more popular. Ob- 

 viously teachers know better than I do how that could be done, or whether 

 it should be done. My purpose here is to speak of the popularization of botany 

 outside of classrooms and to tell a little of my firsthand experiences in 



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