40 



FIFTY YEARS OF PLANT PHYSIOLOGY 

 IN THE U.S.A. 



F. W. Went 



Plant physiology as a separate branch of botany is just 100 years old; its 

 beginning can be traced back to the start of the career of Julius Sachs. Here 

 in the United States it can properly be said that plant physiology is just 

 about SO years old, and many of the botanists who started their careers in 

 the early nineteen hundreds by studying the life processes of the plant are 

 still with us today. A really authentic history could have been presented if 

 AUard, Duggar, Kraus, MacDougal, Osterhout, Shantz, Shive, or Shull had 

 been asked to do so, but these men have earned their emeritate and should 

 not be called upon to perform still further tasks which we younger men can 

 do by looking up the records of their performances. I hope, however, that they 

 will be willing to provide footnotes and add to what I can only inadequately 

 present in half an hour. For most of you of the old guard the trip to Storrs 

 may have become too strenuous. We, who have seen you so often at our 

 yearly meetings, and the younger ones who have not had that privilege, we all 

 salute you, and we rededicate ourselves to furthering botany in the next 

 50 years, as you did in the previous half century. 



History can be approached in many different ways. But since we are deal- 

 ing with such recent history, it seems better not to stress personalities who 

 actually made this history. A proper evaluation of the contributions of each 

 plant physiologist in the United States during the last 50 years is utterly 

 impossible at present. In so many cases the stimulation coming from research, 

 teaching, critical evaluation, or organization in the past 50 years cannot be 

 judged until the next 50 years have elapsed. Toward the end of this talk I 

 will try to give you shortly my own personal evaluation of specific events and 

 investigations, but to begin with I would like to apply the physiological 

 method to the history of plant physiology. Or, to put it more accurately, I 

 would like to analyze the forces which seem to have molded our science into 



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