Philosophy of Botany. 233 



tween botany and the healing art. The former was expected 

 to provide the most potent drugs, and received in return en- 

 couragement of its scientific endeavors. This kind of rela- 

 tionship is presently very unimportant since most of the me- 

 dicinal plants have been eliminated from the materia medica, 

 or are merely obscurely known as domestic remedies. 



Investigation of the disease creating fungi makes up the tie, 

 hereafter setting up new problems for both sciences which 

 cannot be solved advantageously to the benefit of mankind 

 except with mutual aid and cooperation. Modern agricul- 

 ture and forestry are likewise intimately connected with 

 botany. The former seeks to understand the conditions in 

 which plants have to be placed in order to produce the largest 

 returns ; the other depends on information of a sanatory na- 

 ture, or questions concerning the health of forest trees, and the 

 means of averting noxious influences which threaten them 

 with disease and premature decay. 



In this way it has come about that botany is no longer con- 

 fined within the narrow limits of its former territory. Ap- 

 plied to the highest problems of the natural sciences, it is an 

 important element of national culture. We have received 

 and still further expect from it explanations relative to the 

 profound questions concerning life: What is life? What is 

 death? Is there a specific vital power which ever remains 

 the same, immutably indestructible, althougli the individual 

 may perish? Is life possibly merely a phenomenon of the 

 motion of matter ,and equivalent of other forces — light, heat, 

 gravity, chemical affinity — and, under the law of correlation of 

 energy, transmutable into other modes of motion, and pro- 

 ceeding from them? By which process and in what manner 

 has life taken its origin upon earth ? How did it receive shape 

 and expression in the innumerable forms of animals and 

 plants? How did the long intervals of the different geological 

 periods affect it? Finally, are the highest expressions and 

 functions of life — consciousness, sensation, volition, imagina- 

 tion, reflection — operations of a separate cause, or only mod- 

 ifications of life itself, phenomena traceable down to their 

 obscure beginnings, nay, even to the cells of the plants? 



Space does not allow to dilate on this subject, but I may 



