TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION D. 695 



shown to serve as food for ants ? So far from this explanation being farfetched. 

 Belt found that the former ' tree is actually unable to exist ■without its guard,' 

 which it could not secure without some attraction in the shape of food. One fact 

 which strongly unpresses me with a belief in the adaptive significance of vegetative 

 characters is the fact that in almost identical forms they are constantly adopted by 

 plants of widely different affinity. If such forms were without significance one 

 would expect them to be infinitely varied. If, however, they are really adaptive, 

 it is intelligible that diflerent plants should independently avail themselves of the 

 same appliances and expedients. 



Although this country is splendidly equipped with appliances for the study of 

 systematic botanj^, our universities and colleges fall far behind a standard which 

 would be considered even tolerable on the Continent in the means of studying 

 morphological and physiological botany or of making researches in these subjects. 

 There is not at the moment anywhere in London an adequate botanical laboratory, 

 and though at most of the universities matters are not quite so bad, still I am not 

 aware of any one where it is possible to do more than give the routine instruction 

 or to allow the students, when they have passed through this, to work for them- 

 selves. It is not easy to see why this should be, because on the animal side the 

 accommodation and appUances for teaching comparative anatomy and physiology 

 are always adequate and often palatial. Still less explicable to me is the tendency 

 on the part of those who have charge of medical education to eliminate botanical 

 study from the medical curriculum, since historically the animal histologists owe 

 everything to botanists. In the seventeenth century, as I have already mentioned, 

 Hooke first brought the microscope to the investigation of organic structure, and the 

 tissue he examined was cork. Somewhat later. Grew, in his ' Anatomy of Plants,' 

 gave the first germ of the cell-theory. During the eighteenth century the anato- 

 mists were not merely on a hopelessly wrong tack themselves, but they were bent 

 on dragging botanists into it also. It was not till 1837, a little more than fifty 

 years ago, that Henle saw that the structure of epithelium was practically the same 

 as that of the parenchyma jilantarum which Grew had described 150 years before. 

 Two years later Schwann published his immortal theory, which comprised the 

 ultimate facts of plant and animal anatomy under one view. But it was to a 

 botanist, Von Mohl, that, in 18-46, the biological world owed the first clear descrip- 

 tion of protoplasm, and to another botanist, Cohn (1851), the identification of this 

 with the sarcode of zoologists. 



Now the historic order in discovery is not without its significance. The path 

 which the first investigators found most accessible is doubtless that which be- 

 ginners will also find easiest to tread. I do not myself believe that any better 

 access can be obtained to the structure and functions of living tissues than by the 

 study of plants. However, I am not without hopes that the serious study of botany 

 in the laboratory will be in time better cared for. I do not hesitate to claim for it 

 a position of the greatest importance in ordinary scientific education. All the 

 essential phenomena of living organisms can be readily demonstrated iipon plants. 

 The necessary appliances are not so costly, and the work of the class-room is free 

 from many difficulties with which the student of the animal side of biology has to 

 contend. 



Those, howerer, who have seriously devoted themselves to the pursuit of either 

 morphological or physiological botany need not now be wholly at a loss. The 

 splendid laboratory on Plymouth Sound, the erection of which we owe to the 

 energy and enthusiasm of Professor Ray Lankester, is open to botanists as well as 

 to zoologists, and affords every opportunity for the investigation of marine plants, 

 in which little of late years has been done in this country. At Kew we owe to 

 private munificence a commodious laboratory in which mucli excellent work has 

 already been done. And this Association has made a small grant in aid of the 

 establishment of a laboratory in the Royal Botanic Garden at Peradeniya, in 

 Ceylon, It may be hoped that this will afford facilities for work of the same kind 

 as has yielded Dr. Treub such a rich harvest of results in the Buitenzorg Botanic 

 Garden in Java, 



Physiological botany, as I have already pointed out, is a field in which this 



