TRANSACTIONS 



BOTANICAL SOCIETY OF EDINBURGH. 



SESSION LXXXVI 



Presidential Address — Agricultural Botany in the 

 Past Fifty Years. By W. G. Smith, B.Sc, Ph D. 



(Read ^Oth October 1921.) 



A presidential address is an opportunity to look around 

 and survey some branch of knowledge. From time to 

 time this has been done by predecessors in this chair. It 

 is like looking over a countryside from a high view-point 

 — one can observe the lie of the land, neglecting minor 

 details. To deal with the whole field of botany is too 

 large a task, hence I propose to limit myself to things that 

 in my opinion have helped to establish what is called 

 agricultural botany. A further limitation to a fift3"-year 

 period, back to about 1870, seems justifiable, as it avoids 

 groping through a somewhat scanty period of literature 

 that marks the evolution of order out of chaos. About 

 fifty years ago an agricultural botanist was defined as 

 someone who knew a little of agriculture, and less of 

 botany. That does not hold good now, for many of the 

 more recent problems concerned with soil science, plant 

 nutrition, heredity, and pathology require a thorough 

 knowledge of the latest researches in botany, and a good 

 deal of cross-reference to chemistry, zoology, and bacterio- 

 logy, even to higher mathematics in calculations referring 

 to heredity and the probable error in field experiments. 



Crop Plants — No new cereals have been introduced 



TRANS. EOT. SOC. EDIN. VOL. XXVm. 8 



