petual questions that man is asking regarding the world 

 about him. 



Under botany we have to consider all the questions as 

 to the form, the functions, the classification and the dis- 

 tribution of those organisms that are called plants. Along 

 what lines this study is prosecuted, how it is related to 

 other fields of intellectual activity, and some specific in- 

 stances of its problems and the manner in which they 

 may be solved is what I shall attempt to tell you. 



It would be out of place in a talk like this to devote too 

 much time to a consideration of the historical side of the 

 subject, and therefore only a few of the important move- 

 ments can be pointed out. Any folk which had so far 

 emerged from the stage of savagery as to stop to notice 

 the world about it would perforce pay some attention to 

 plants. A discrimination of the medicinal uses of plants is 

 often noticeable even in primitive peoples, and with such 

 observation goes also the discrimination of difference in 

 form, the prototype of morphological research. I have 

 seen a Malay coolie who could distinguish seven forms of 

 tropical oaks where the botanist recognizes only four, an 

 evidence that sharp observation is not confined to the 

 highly developed races. 



In our own civilization, we can trace back the history 

 of botany to Aristotle, who affords us some record of the 

 plant forms known at his time, though the influence which 

 his philosophy wielded, even down to the middle of the last 

 century, was of vastly greater importance than any con- 

 tribution which he made to botany itself. Theophrastus 

 gave a fuller account of plants, and later came the inquir- 

 ing and ever curious Pliny. Dioscorides, however, in the 

 first or second century of our era, was one of the first to 

 investigate plants with any attempt at thoroughness even 

 from the standpoint of the knowledge of the time. As is 

 shown especially by Dioscorides' work, the study of 



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