PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. SECTION' C. 45 



tecting the plants, is to learn something of the lively apprecia- 

 tion felt bv the public for such an institution — an institution 

 whose principal attractions are due to a rich collection of plants, 

 admirably grouped, but brought together in the interests of 

 pure and' applied Botany and Horticulture. Before leaving the 

 subject of the South African indigenous vegetation, attention 

 should be drawn to the need for its study from an economic 

 standpoint. South Africa, a country of Euphorbias, has done 

 no experimental work designed to remove the difficulties which 

 have prevented them from acquiring a commercial value as 

 rubber plants. Of our native fibre-plants, medicinal, resinous, 

 and poison plants, fodder plants and others, we have verv little 

 exact knowledge. Here is a practically untouched field for the 

 activities of a well-organised State Department of Botany. 



A collection of plants under cultivation affords opportunities 

 for investigating their structure and life conditions. I need 

 hardly explain that science has not finished with a plant when it 

 has been labelled and placed in a herbarium. In fact, this is 

 only a necessary preliminary to the more intimate study of the 

 living plant. Biologists everywhere are busy with the many rami- 

 fications of the problem of life, and we are called upon to do 

 our share in widening the boundaries of human knowledge. 

 Investigations of this character very generally necessitate keep- 

 ing the plants for longer or shorter intervals under close obser- 

 vation. This demands a garden equipped with experimental 

 facilities and staffed by men trained to make use of them. This 

 department of the work of a Botanic garden is of the greatest 

 scientific importance, and it is therefore incumbent upon a 

 civilised community to foster it. apart from the possibility of 

 any practical results that may emerge. Research is, or should 

 be, undertaken with the single obiect of discovering truth, re- 

 gardless of the consequences. These, however, may at any 

 time assume a practical and economic importance which no one 

 has been less inclined to expect than the investigator himself. 

 When the Abbot of Brunn crossed different varieties of peas 

 in his monastery garden he and those who immediately fol- 

 lowed him were so little conscious that his work possessed any 

 practical value that it remained unnoticed, indeed forgotten, for 

 more than thirty years. But within the last decade we have 

 seen the rise of a great and influential school of Biologists, 

 who, starting from the basis established by Mendel, have 

 already shewn that, within certain limits, we have the power 

 to produce new races of animals and plants with a precision 

 almost equal to that of the Chemist when he prepares hydrogen 

 by combining zinc with sulphuric acid. The economic conse- 

 quences thus arising out of Mendel's simple experiments in the 

 early " sixties " are immense, and their limits are not yet to be 

 defined. Work on these lines is in progress in all part.-; of the 

 world where there are biologists with the means of conducting 

 suitable experiments. In South Africa, so far as I am aware, 

 no serious efforts have been made in this direction, except in 

 the Transvaal and recently at Robertson, under the 

 Departments of Agriculture. But here is a branch of investi- 



