SCIENCE OF INTENSIVE CULTIVATION 115 



truth that botanists are more concerned with 

 dead than with living plants : that many of us 

 could prescribe a variety of recipes for the elegant 

 killing of plants but few would be able to keep 

 them decently alive. 



Needless to say the suggestion that botanists 

 should concentrate their attention on problems of 

 intensive cultivation does not mean that they 

 should usurp the function of gardeners and farmers. 

 It means that in the national interest no less than 

 in the interest of Botany they should devote all 

 the attention possible to the pure science of inten- 

 sive cultivation. They no less than the workers in 

 scientific agriculture and horticulture must help to 

 bridge the gulf between the laboratory and the 

 land.- It will of course and more seriously be 

 objected that the intensive cultivation of the land 

 is in part a craft and in part an applied science. 

 Very well, then, give the workers in applied science 

 the pure science they must employ. It cannot be 

 insisted on too strongly that the assumption which 

 underlies the segregation of science into pure and 

 applied is by no means wholly valid. According 

 to that assumption, pure science discovers and 

 formulates general principles or laws and applied 

 science makes practical application of these laws 

 to particular cases in order to secure utilitarian 

 ends. But the distinction between these two 

 divisions of science can rarely be maintained. 

 Was MetchnikofFs work on inflammation and the 



82 



