ON THE POPULARIZATION OF BOTANY 457 



popularization, which go back now thirty years during which I have earned 

 most of my hving in that way. Sometimes, indeed, I was not making much 

 of a hving, especially at the beginning when I ran a "Nature column" in the 

 Washington Evening Star and wrote articles for Nature Magazine. At the 

 same time I was finishing and trying to find a publisher for my first book. 

 Cargoes and Harvests, a popularization of economic botany. And I can still 

 recall how much I had had to learn about the skills of popularization and how 

 little I had been prepared for it, even in the correct point of view, by my 

 formal botanical training. 



Base, common, and popular I must then have seemed to my botanical 

 friends like a lieutenant broken to the rank of sergeant or corporal. At 

 Harvard, in most of the classes I had attended, economic botany had been 

 despised as something tainted with commercialism, and as for popularization, 

 it was considered no part of botany at all but to belong, rather, to the disci- 

 pline (if any) of journalism. As for the interest I had always had in linking 

 botany with other things in life — philosophy, for instance, human history, 

 folklore — the breadth of my interests had often been taken as proof of my 

 shallowness, and sometimes roused outspoken criticism. Thus in the big mid- 

 western university where I first began my botanical studies, I was told by a 

 laboratory assistant (now a well-known professor), "The way I size you up, 

 you're one of these smatter-artists we get around here sometimes.'' 



After digesting this, I decided to accept the judgment, not in the spirit 

 in which it had been intended, but in my own way. I reflected that Darwin, 

 for instance, whose interests ranged from volcanoes to orchids, from earth- 

 worms to tropical island birds, had been a smatter-artist. And it was the very 

 power of his pen to popularize that (with the even more popular pens of 

 those smatter-artists Thomas Huxley and Alfred Russel Wallace) had raised 

 the storm over evolution. And but for the storm, the world might still be 

 largely in ignorance of evolution, and even in scientific circles it might now be 

 a dustcatcher on the academic shelves. For evolution as a concept had a long 

 pre-Darwinian history, but each time it had come up it had been allowed to 

 die unnoticed by the scientists themselves — perhaps for the lack of a public 

 storm over it. 



For that matter, who was ever more of a smatter-artist than Linnaeus, 

 "father of botany" (so-called)? His interests and writings ranged from the 

 migration of birds to the ethnology of the Lapps, from forest management 

 to the life history of the reindeer and its tormentor, the botfly, and the rein- 

 deer's chief sustenance, the lichens. True that Linnaeus was not the first to 

 demonstrate the sexuality of plants, but he was the first to popularize it, 

 with the result that even botanists, however reluctantly, came to accept it. 

 He was not the first to employ binomial nomenclature with its implied con- 

 cepts of genus and species (he had indeed a less keen sense of genera than 

 Tournefort and of species than Ray), but Linnaeus it was who made binomial 



