8 THE LIFE OF THE PLANT 



accomplishes its aims, that we are able to direct its en- 

 ergies to our advantage and oblige it to yield us the best 

 and most abundant fruit. Obviously the physiology 

 of plants must be made the foundation of agriculture. 

 Agriculture, like medicine, rambled on for a long time 

 in the sterile provinces of empiricism and speculation 

 before it came to this conclusion. The same thing has 

 happened there as happened in medicine so many years 

 previously. 



Rational agriculture is a much younger science than 

 rational medicine ; consequently the necessity for a 

 knowledge of the physiology of the plant, and a demand 

 for such knowledge, arose also later. But the necessity 

 having once arisen, it cannot remain without influence 

 upon the fate of the physiology of plants. The physi- 

 ology of plants will develop in the schools of agriculture 

 in the same way as the physiology of animals developed 

 in the schools of medicine. A whole network of ' experi- 

 mental stations ' has already spread over Germany and 

 America ; the Government in France, private individuals 

 and societies in England, are working towards the same 

 end ; even poor Italy, overburdened with debt though 

 she be, is making an effort to pursue the same course. 



In all such ' stations,' as well as in other agricultural 

 institutions, experimental physiology has established 

 itself beside agriculture, and is setting to work to further 

 its progress, and gaining at the same time the advantage 

 of the precious experience it has accumulated during so 

 many centuries. So must it be on the analogy of other 

 sciences, and so doubtless it will be. Meanwhile, 

 however, a comparison of these modest experimental 

 stations and the still more modest botanical laboratories 

 of Europe with the luxurious palaces in which medicine 

 dwells, and especially a comparison of the insignificant 

 number of botanists engaged in physiological research 

 with the thousands of doctors who are and have been 

 engaged all over Europe in the study of the physiology 



