PHYSIOLOGICAL TEACHING IN BOTANY 403 



of his lieutenants, Professor Thiselton-Dyer, afterwards 

 Assistant and successor to Hooker at Kew, himself a student 

 of the physiological botany which had made such strides in 

 Germany, as well as * knowing plants * after the fashion of 

 the older botanists. 



Hooker's own excursions into botanical physiology enabled 

 him to realise the vast importance of this, as an educational 

 influence, as technical training, and as a guide to the true 

 relations of plants as determined by descent and kinship. 

 But to his mind, with its encyclopaedic knowledge of specimens, 

 there was one drawback to this insistence on the study of 

 structure and function. ' You young men,' he once exclaimed 

 to Professor Bower, * do not know your plants.' ^ 



His appreciation of the change which ten years had brought 

 about is well shown by his advice to a botanist, then working 

 abroad, who had been trained in the old school, not to stand 

 for a botanical chair then vacant in England (1884) : 



My impression is, that it would not suit you, without 

 indeed you have kept up a knowledge and practice of 

 Physiology, minute anatomy, and chemico-phytology, and 

 indeed physico-phytology, which now form the staple of the 

 Botanical teaching, and above all of Botanical examinations 

 in this country. Botany is no longer a knowledge of plants, 

 but how parts of plants * come about ' and what they do ! 

 you begin with yeast, moulds, &c., and the higher you go the 

 less you know of the whole plants and the more of their 

 * inwards.' There is no question of the high scientific value 

 and interest of all this, but the outcome of years of it may 

 leave a man in utter ignorance of any plant bigger than the 

 Torula and Mucor he began with. Botany of this sort is 

 the study of the laws of hf e, the highest of any : but to pursue 

 it requires a special education ; and to teach it, a special 

 practice ; and I do not know if you have had either. I have 

 not. It is most necessary for the modern physician and 

 surgeon ; it is the gate through which he enters the study of 



^ Apropos of the knowledge of plants and their uses possessed by the old 

 field botanists, Mr. Elwes tells a story of how he and Hooker and Berkeley the 

 mycologist were lunching together, when some new pickles from the West Indies 

 were placed on the table. Berkeley alone, with his knowledge of Materia 

 Medica, was able to identify the ingredients. 



