652 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION XK. 
Section K.—BOTANY. 
PRESIDENT OF THE SECTION: 
Lieut.-Colonel Davip Pray, C.I.E., LL.D., F.R.S. 
THURSDAY, AUGUST 26. 
The President delivered the following Address :— 
Sutor ne supra crepidam judicaret, probably an old saying when Pliny wrote, 
is still a safe guide. The limitations of life and of knowledge are different, 
and human effort is thereby so conditioned that progress depends on specialisa- 
tion in study. Specialisation lessens the temptation to forget this caution ; 
but the force of the proverb is not weakened. It also conveys a behest, and 
compliance with this behest helps to counteract the narrowed outlook which 
specialisation sometimes encourages. 
Those whose studies are confined to some limited field often welcome a 
sketch of the aims and methods of work with which they are not familiar. 
Such a sketch may be held to have served its purpose if the subject discussed, 
and its relationship to cognate studies, be rendered intelligible. 
No apology, therefore, is made for the subject now taken up, even if it be 
sometimes hinted that this subject—Systematic Botany—is inimical to origin- 
ality, the antithesis of scientific, and outside the limits of botany proper. 
These views depend on half-truths and arbitrary connotations. They do not 
affect the fact that the primary purpose of systematic study is to advance 
natural knowledge. The systematic worker, in furthering this object, does 
not halt to consider whether his work be applied rather than original, 
technical rather than scientific. 
As a matter of history, the scope of systematic study practically coincides 
with what botany once implied ; as a matter cf fact, it corresponds to what 
zoology implies now. ‘The accident that man, on his physical side, is like the 
beasts that perish has led to the recognition of animal physiology and anatomy 
as independent sciences. Owing to the absence of any such fortuitous circum- 
stance vegetable anatomy and physiology remain under the ancestral roof. 
These off-shoots of botany are as vigorous as their zoological counterparts. 
They may be entitled to think that systematic methods are old-fashioned, and 
it may be desirable that they should set up separate establishments or form 
alliances with the corresponding off-shoots of zoology. But nothing in all this 
justifies the eviction of systematic botany from the family home. 
The statement that systematic methods are old-fashioned may be accepted 
without conceding that these methods are out of date. Systematic work, while 
sharing in the general advance in knowledge, has been able, amid far-reaching 
changes, to maintain continuity of method in the pursuit of its double pur- 
pose. This has been a benefit to botany as a whole when crucial discoveries or 
illuminating theories have, in other fields, led to a reorientation of view 
requiring the use of fresh tablets for the record of new results. 
