Notes and Comments. 315 
really familiar with some limited portion of applied botany, 
so as to be able to give useful assistance and advice at need. 
The stimulus to investigation would amply repay the time re- 
quired. Even in continuing to devote ourselves to pure botany 
we cannot afford to waste time and energy in purposeless work. 
It is written in ‘ Alice in Wonderland’ that ‘ no wise fish goes 
anywhere without a porpoise,’ and this might hang as a text 
in every research laboratory. A plant is a very mysterious 
and wonderful thing, and our business as botanists is to try 
to understand and explain it as a whole and to avoid being 
bound by any conventional views of the moment. We have 
to think of the plant as at once a physico-chemical mechanism 
and as a living being ; to avoid either treating it as something 
essentially different from non-living matter or forcibly ex- 
plaining it by the physics and chemistry of to-day. It is an 
advantage of the study of causal morphology that it requires 
us to keep the line between these two crudities, a line that may 
some day lead us to a causal explanation of the developing 
plant and the beginnings of a single science of botany. 
MRS. HENRY SIDGWICK’S ADDRESS. 
Mrs. Sidgwick was the President of the Educational Science 
Section, and expressed the opinion that the general public must 
be encouraged to take its share even in the part of education 
carried on at school and college, and in particular those members 
of the general public who are parents of pupils. But this 
conclusion is rather barren, for she had no very definite plan 
to suggest for carrying it out. The State cannot now, even if 
it would, abandon the responsibility for the elementary school 
education of the children, and even if it could, it is more than 
doubtful whether it would be desirable. For though we 
have now secured that all parents shall themselves have had 
school education, we still cannot trust them all voluntarily 
to give that advantage to their children. So the drawback 
must be put up with that parents cannot feel the same degree 
of responsibility resting on themselves when the responsibility 
is undertaken by the State. It is to be hoped, however, that 
we shall be very careful how far we entrust to the State the 
regulation of education higher than the primary. Bureau- 
cratic regulation may be well adapted to produce German 
Kultur, but it is not the way to secure the attitude of mind 
which leads to freedom, independence of thought, and culture 
in the best sense. And it is very apt to lead to want of inde- 
pendence in the teacher. Probably our best hope for progress 
in the right direction lies in movements like the Workers’ 
Educational Association, where we have voluntary effort put 
forward to satisfy spontaneous desire to learn. As this move- 
ment extends we hope more and more to get a generation 
1915 Oct. 1. 
