1424 AGRICULTURAL BOTAXY, CHEMISTRY AXD PHYSIOLOGY OF PLATXS 



(genetics) are doing much to mitigate the evils which follow from undue 

 devotion to purely laiboratoTy work. Ecology and genetics are taking 

 the botanist into the field and will, in all probability, materially influence 

 the future development of the science. This will be all to the good and 

 should do much both to raise the standard and emphasize the importance 

 of field work and also develop the natural history side of botany. The 

 botany of the future is likely to combine all that is valuable in laborator}' 

 work with modern ideas on ecology, classification, and genetics. 



The relation oj Botany to Agriculture. 



A wide scientific outlook on the man}' aspects of plant life is the first 

 coudition in applying botanical science to practical problems. The next 

 step for the botanist is to study his crop in the field and to learn to appre- 

 ciate the agricultural aspects of crop-production. The investigator must 

 himself be able to grow his crop to perfection and it is not too much to say 

 that no real progress can be made without this. The ordinary agiicul- 

 tural processes applied to any crop bear a direct relationship to the physio- 

 logical necessities of the plant and have been evolved from centuries of 

 traditional experience. In all investigations on crops, a first-hand knowledge 

 of practice is necessary and nowhere is it so impoitant as in plant -breeding 

 work where practice is quite as valuable as an acquaintance with the methods 

 and results of genetics. The greatest devotion to the study of inheritance, 

 using for this purpose material indifferently grown, is largely labom lost 

 as many cha: acters are masked unless the plants are really thriving and well 

 developed. For instance in wheat, the red colour of the chaff never develops 

 in badly grow^n plants thereby causing great confusion in systematic and 

 breeding work on this crop. In tobacco, the various leaf characters are 

 almost entirely masked by bad cultivation and their inheritance can only 

 be studied if the crop is grown to perfection. 



Science and practice must be combined in the investigator who must 

 himself strike a correct balance between the two. The ideal point of view 

 of the improver is to recognize agriculture as an art which can best be de- 

 veloped by that instrument called science. Once this is fully realized and 

 acted upon, the place of the experiment station in agriculture will be under- 

 stood as a matter of course and the qualifications needed by the workers 

 will be self-evident. There will be little or no progress if practical agricul- 

 turists aie associated with pure scientists in economic investigations. This 

 has often been tried and has never yielded result? of any importance. The 

 reason why such co-operation fails is that without an appreciation of 

 practice the scientist himself never gets to the real heart of the problem. The 

 history of the indigo investigations in India i-^ a very good case in point. 

 During the last 20 years, a number of scientists have been employed in an 

 endeavour to improve the production of natural indigo. Over £50,000 

 have been expended on this work between 1898 and igijbutno results have 

 been obtained, largely because the scientists preferred to engage European 

 assistants on indigo estates to grow their experimental crops rather than to 

 cultivate them themselves. The result was that the real problems were 

 not discovered, a large amount of ineffective work was done and valuable 



