29 



THE ODOR OF BOTANY 



Harry J . Fuller 



"Botany is in bad odor in American universities. I am mad about plants and 

 would never wish to be anything else but a botanist. If anything could stop 

 me, however, it would be one of these courses (the average general botany 

 course). These are the kinds of courses by and large which have gotten 

 botany into the bad odor it's in. They are mostly botany taught by plant 

 physiologists or geneticists or something else who are quite rightly ashamed 

 of being botanists, seeing what most of them are like, so each produces 

 courses with as little botany in them as possible. To get botany back where it 

 should be we need to design a course as far away from the norm of these 

 courses as possible." 



This provocative and scarcely equivocal paragraph is from a letter which 

 came to my desk a short time ago from one of our country's distinguished 

 botanists, a scientist of unusual imagination and ability, a member of the 

 National Academy of Science, a man of broad and deep education and of 

 wide scientific and humanitarian interests. When a man of his caliber writes 

 thus, he should command our attention and a fair hearing (after we have 

 recovered from our initial irritation, of course). My first reading of that 

 paragraph both annoyed and troubled me; my subsequent readings have 

 almost erased that annoyance in view of the patent sincerity of my corre- 

 spondent. But I am still troubled, for, although I regard some of his remarks 

 as unjust and extreme (I am convinced that the effluvium of botany is no 

 more noxious than that emanating from history or physics or family living 

 or zoology or English literature or restaurant management or television science 

 or any of the other subjects in which American universities currently grant 

 degrees), I admit to a degree of truth in his contention. And that bit of truth 

 must inevitably trouble us botanists, for if there is one thing which binds 

 us into both a professional organization and a confraternity of the mind, it is 

 our love of plants and of the science of plants. 



The Golden Jubilee Volume Committee which invited me to write this 



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