THE ODOR OF BOTANY 493 



life cycle of that wheat rust fungus, and I still have sneaking feelings of 

 treason.) 



2. We have been, like many other academicians, slaves to tradition. We 

 have, most of us, studied general botany courses of remarkably uniform organi- 

 zation. We began our study of botany with cells, we journeyed through the 

 bodies of flowering plants, noting details of their anatomy, metabolism, repro- 

 duction, and inheritance as we traveled, and then we took a tour of the plant 

 kingdom, omitting not a single phylum nor a single traditional life cycle. And 

 we commonly go on teaching general botany in accordance with that same pat- 

 tern. Breaking with tradition is always a psychologically difficult wrench, but 

 perhaps we need to steel ourselves to make such a break. If we are interested 

 in training young people to follow in our steps as professional botanists, we 

 can pour upon and into them all the requisite details of plant structure, 

 physiology, inheritance, taxonomy, and phylogeny in the advanced courses 

 in which they will necessarily register. But in dealing with students who will 

 not become botany majors, we should be willing to admit that other aspects 

 of plant life may be more suitable to their education: how plants grow, why 

 they grow where they do, how they differ in their cultural requirements, their 

 biological relationships with animals, their involvements in human life and in 

 the great nature cycles, etc. I believe that the inclusion of more of these 

 "natural history" features of plants in our general botany courses might con- 

 stitute the greatest improvement which we could effect in the teaching of 

 general botany, at least in so far as subject matter is concerned. In this con- 

 nection, emphasis upon the relations of botany with other sciences is clearly 

 indicated, as exemplified by the topic of the origin of cultivated plants, which 

 cuts across the fields of archaeology, anthropology, geography, physics, 

 philology, and botany. Certainly the work and writings of Merrill, of 

 Mangelsdorf, of Weatherwax, of de Candolle, of Vavilov, and of others in 

 this general field would constitute a stimulating, educationally broadening, 

 and scientifically respectable topic for inclusion in general botany, even at 

 the expense of the life cycle of Ulothrix or of the morphology of the reproduc- 

 tive parts of Cycadales. 



A concomitant of our cleaving to tradition is our too-frequent belief that, 

 if a topic has direct relation to human life, it is possibly unscientific or at 

 least intellectually too demimondain for inclusion in a university-level botany 

 course. I shall never forget, for example, a taxonomist whom I knew who, 

 upon being asked to identify several cultivated garden ornamentals, responded 

 grandly, "Fm sorry I don't know what these are. As soon as plants are cul- 

 tivated, I lose interest in them." That this attitude is not rare is indicated, 

 I believe, by the fact that our knowledge of the botany of many important 

 cultivated plants is woefully inadequate. I have observed that some plant 

 physiologists, though they are well versed in the theoretical bases of mineral 

 nutrition of plants, know little of the manufacture, composition, and uses 



