CHAPTER XI 



CONCLUSION 



WE have now surveyed, not in the details of fact but 

 in the outline of fundamental principles, the field of 

 modern botany. We see that it is no narrow and re- 

 stricted subject, dry as the herbarium plants which 

 used long ago to symbolise it. It is full of living interest, 

 ramifying in many directions ; it comprises branches 

 technically distinct and requiring considerable know- 

 ledge and dexterity to pursue, all of which are com- 

 bined and held together by the main philosophical 

 principles that underlie the whole. 



The really essential study in modern botany may be 

 summed up in the phrase that it attempts to discover 

 how plants live and how they came to be alive. Each 

 branch of the subject described in the preceding chapters 

 bears on these two problems. The systematist de- 

 scribes and arranges the plants now living, and, in con- 

 junction with the palaeobotanist, those also of the past. 

 When they are in order it is seen how they grade 

 themselves, and the question arises whether this series, 

 from simple to complex, represents the order in which 

 they appeared on the earth, and whether the systematist 'a 

 classification corresponds to a more or less complete 

 genealogical tree. The palseobotanist partly answers 

 this question in the affirmative, but at the same time 

 still further amplifies it, and discovers new questions 



88 



