115 
BOTANY IN RELATION TO AGRICULTURE AND 
OTHER APPLIED SCIENCES 
While botany, as the study of spring flowers, or of the 
classification of flowering plants, is indeed a fascinating pastime, 
it is avowedly a much more serious and interesting subject 
when viewed in a broader way as a fundamental science under- 
lying agriculture and many other applied sciences. Botany is, 
in fact, no longer narrowly regarded merely as the study of 
flowers, but rather as the scientific study of plants as a whole 
viewed from all possible points of view. 
As the science which arranges in an orderly fashion all the 
known facts about plants, and ever seeks new facts about them, 
botany ranks on an equal footing with its great sister science, 
zoology, as a component of the subdivision of biology, which 
treats of living things. Biology, in turn, may conveniently be 
placed alongside physics and chemistry, t 
— 
re three constituting 
the very foundation stones of all the subsidiary natural sciences. 
This is indeed the day of specialism in science. Among 
the devotees of what has sometimes been called “pure botany,” 
dealing more directly with the older and narrower view of the 
subject, are systematic botanists, or taxonomists, who classify 
plants; physiologists, who study plants in relation to their ac- 
tivities and functions; cytologists, who study primarily the vital 
activities and functions of the cells of which plants are com- 
posed; ecologists, who study plants in relation to their environ- 
ment; plant geographers, who study plant distribution as in- 
fluenced by soil and climatic factors; morphologists, who study 
largely form and structure and deduce therefrom ideas of evo- 
lutionary relationship. 
In recent years, we have begun to apply our studies of 
plants more directly to human needs. “Applied botany,” while 
perhaps ill deserving the sharp separation from the so-called 
“pure science” insisted on by a diminishing few, concerns itself 
primarily with an immediate economic, or practical, end. Scien- 
tiic men, as well as some broad-minded administrators, are 
coming to believe, however, as has been long insisted on by 
President Van Hise, of the University of Wisconsin, that all 
scientific investigation, no matter how seemingly remote the im- 
