496 FULLER 



ruts, others are the consequences of regarding general botany not as a 

 fundamentally important intellectual discipline, but rather as a kind of 

 academic sideline subservient to the direction of graduate study or to con- 

 centration upon personal research. Many teachers of general botany are 

 aware of these weaknesses but are so circumscribed by practical pressures 

 that, despite their awareness of them and their desire to eliminate them, they 

 are unable to do so. Inadequate laboratory space, lack of greenhouse facilities, 

 and shortage of experienced and stimulating instructors combine to produce an 

 educational environment which often precludes the possibility of making these 

 desired improvements, at least on an extensive scale. It is difficult, nay im- 

 possible, to provide for a truly exploratory type of laboratory work with a 

 large degree of individual freedom for students when one must handle 700 

 students in a semester in three laboratory rooms; under such conditions, the 

 hand-holding laboratory manual and the Gruppenjiihrer are inescapable. 

 One of the partial solutions to this problem lies in raising entrance standards, 

 especially in some of our state universities which appear to accept any 

 student who can walk, talk, and remain upright for several hours at a time, 

 to exclude those students who are totally incapable of college work and who 

 will flunk out anyway at the end of their first semester in college. Our specific 

 teaching weaknesses are thus in part directly related to administrative policies 

 and problems. Perhaps the first effective step in achieving certain improve- 

 ments in the teaching of general botany might be the vigorous and persuasive 

 selling of our practical teaching needs to deans and presidents. Perhaps it 

 is time for us to lay aside that "excessive meekness" and to march up to the 

 ticket window with a demand for at least a cabin-class ticket! 



I am certain that most of us would not agree with my correspondent's 

 allegation that botany, at this half-century mark in our Society's history, is 

 redolent of Symplocarpus foetidus. I am equally certain that most of us 

 would agree in all honesty that general botany is scarcely fragrant in the 

 manner of Plumeria acutifolia or Canangium odoratum. To make it so will 

 be one of our most important and fruitful tasks during our next half century. 



