SCIENCE AND EDUCATION 55 
should ever carry a fresh and vigorous supply of new workers 
back to the laboratories is not functioning effectively in either 
direction. The public is not receiving just returns on its in- 
vestment and it is only natural that the condition should be 
met by indifference and the withdrawal of support. 
The U. 8. Commissioner of Education tells us that the num- 
ber of high school students taking botany decreased 45% 
between 1910 and 1915, and that less than 8% of the total 
enrollment studied the subject. 
Botanists must decide if it is desirable for the present move- 
ment to continue. It means that in the near future botany will 
be studied only in the colleges and the universities, and that 
knowledge of plant life from the scientific point of view will 
gradually disappear from the people who receive their entire 
education in the elementary and the secondary schools. If this 
is considered desirable then the present course which is a sort 
of intellectual isolation is the correct one to pursue. 
Any one who knows the subject matter of botany and who is 
interested in public education will look upon such a result as a 
calamity both to the science and to education. 
The attempted solutions which have been presented recently 
under the names of Civic Biology—Elementary Agriculture, 
General Science, and other popular names have for the most 
part been unsatisfactory to the botanists. We feel as if we 
were trying under a camouflage of popular phrases, to teach 
our students a little botany without them knowing it. A rose 
by any other name may be as sweet, but the botany which has 
been offered under these assumed names has in most cases been 
so dilute that it is well nigh valueless. It perpetuates none of 
the valuable history of our science, meets the present needs 
only in the most superficial way, neither does it have any 
elements of promise in it for the future. 
There is, after all, a good deal in a name and it is very 
unfortunate that botany has become a synonym of uselessness 
in the public mind. The name seems to stimulate about the 
same round of emotions in the average individual that the term 
Nature Study creates among the scientists, except, perhaps, 
