492 FULLER 



ence as a consequence of their work as teaching assistants, and I do not 

 propose the elimination of such teaching; what I argue for is less frequent use 

 of such teaching in general botany and more supervision of this type of teach- 

 ing by experienced teachers in the full-time faculty ranks. 



The administrative culpability in the matter of the aforementioned botanical 

 odor appears also in the often niggardly budgetary support of general botany 

 teaching. Many of us who have been engaged mainly in the teaching of general 

 botany have traveled steerage class so long that we simply do not think to 

 ask for a cabin-class or even a tourist-class ticket. We use the same slides 

 long past the time when only the ghost of safranin is left, we patch and repatch 

 our charts, and, as for asking for a new greenhouse or additional greenhouse 

 space just for the teaching of general botany — well! In many universities it 

 is a relatively simple matter to acquire funds for the construction of a new 

 research greenhouse or for a self-recording, free-wheeling spectrophotometer, 

 or a series of controlled-temperature rooms, hooked either in series or in 

 parallel, or an air-conditioned ultra-microtome with automatic shift and hot 

 and cold running water — but ask for greenhouse additions so that under- 

 graduate students in introductory botany may grow and experiment upon 

 living plants, and see how far up the administrative ladder your request is 

 likely to ascend! Perhaps we are guilty of what a former president of our 

 Society, Neil Stevens, called the "excessive meekness of botanists." 



Not all the odor is of administrative origin, of course. Much of it, the 

 greater part of it, in all probability, is of our making. And, in all fairness, 

 we must admit that the administrative attitudes which I have criticized 

 reflect in considerable degree faculty attitudes, for administrators do not 

 administer in vacuo or by reading fresh chicken entrails; they even consult 

 their professors from time to time and seek advice of them. How have we 

 botanists failed to bring the teaching of general botany to the level of ex- 

 cellence which it deserves? I believe that our faults have been chiefly the 

 following : 



1. We have too often failed to realize that the majority of our general- 

 botany students will never have the pleasure of a second course in botany, 

 that most of them will not become professional botanists. As a consequence 

 of this unawareness, we frequently teach general botany as though all our 

 students were going to become botany majors. We may carry our research 

 interests too often and too intensively into the general-botany classroom and 

 may feel affronted if someone suggests that some of the things in which we 

 are especially engrossed might be omitted from general botany without edu- 

 cational loss. Morphologists may not regard general botany as botany at all 

 if some of those life histories are omitted, and plant physiologists may consider 

 themselves and general botany short-changed if some of the details of mineral 

 nutrition, ion absorption, and respiration are played down. (I have finally 

 mustered the courage to omit from the third edition of The Plant World the 



