ON THE POPULARIZATION OF BOTANY 46 1 



addressed to a mature-minded if hard-to-get public and the writing of a 

 simplified school textbook. For the reader of an elementary textbook is 

 usually of an adolescent or just post-adolescent mentality and is not only 

 compelled to read the assignment but even to buy the book — a condition 

 of affairs that the free-lance popularizer may well envy! The writer of a 

 textbook which succeeds in getting several big state "adoptions" may some- 

 times look forward, I am told by a prominent publisher, to an income from 

 his book, alone, of something in the neighborhood of $10,000 a year, for some 

 years at least. And he is under no compulsion to make his book interesting, or 

 to make students feel that they would like to go on with the subject here 

 expounded. 



But in popularizing any subject, the author has to remember on every 

 page, in every sentence, that the reader is not obliged to buy the book at all. 

 He can buy any other book on the market, in whatever field he may choose, 

 or he may spend his money in some quite different way. So that the popularizer 

 of an unsensational subject like botany finds himself in competition not only 

 with other books of the same sort, but with all the books in the world, while 

 the reader of it admits no obligation to "get certain things," as my old Virgil 

 teacher used to say while killing the poetry with prosody and parsing. The 

 reader expects you to bring him the points that seem important to you. You 

 cannot say to him "you ought to be understanding this even if I do not make 

 myself easily clear; you ought to be liking this." The reader, at the first 

 suggestion of this sort, will start skipping pages, and there is nothing to 

 prevent him from skipping off to the motion pictures or some other occupation, 

 and never reading your book again. I respectfully submit that popularization 

 has very stern disciplines of its own, and if any one thinks they are easy to 

 master, let him try to make a living within their exacting limits. 



Yet despite all one may urge in favor of popularization, many a scientist 

 harbors strong mental reservations about it. Of these reservations the most 

 serious and the only one I shall have time to deal with here is the matter 

 of inaccuracy. There are two classes of inaccuracies in any sort of writing. 

 The first is unintentional and includes the mere "slip," such as a typograph- 

 ical error. Thus an excellent flora written by one of the high officers of system- 

 atic botany contains the statement that the stems of a certain plant are 

 "covered with stout pickles." This is merely ludicrous, yet it has caused its 

 author, he tells me, poignant shame. Or the mistakes may be due to sheer 

 ignorance; nobody knows better than I how deeply one may blush for this 

 sort. Or the facts and statistics may go out of date, leaving a book high and 

 dry. My first work. Cargoes and Harvests, suffered this fate; it is now so 

 out of date in spots as to be untrustworthy. And Kerner von Marilaun's 

 incomparable Natural History of Plants has similarly suffered. Its physiology, 

 in particular, is woefully antiquated, and all of it has a leisurely mid- Victorian 



