TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION K. Sol 



SECTION K.— BOTANY. 



Presidext of the Section. — H, MAKsiiArL Ward, D.Sc, F.R.S., Professor 

 of Botany in the University of Cambridge. 



Tlie President delivered the following Address on Friday, August 20 : — 



The competent historian of our branch of science will have no lack of materials 

 when he comes to review the progress of botany daring the latter half of the 

 Victorian reign. The task of doing justice to the work in phanerogamic botany 

 alone, under the leadership of men like Hooker, Asa Gray, Mueller, Eugler, 

 Warming, and the army of systematists so husily shifting the frontiers of the 

 various natural groups of flowering plants, will need able hands for satisfactory 

 treatment. A mere sketch of the influence of Kew, the principal centre of syste- 

 matic botany, and of the active contingents of Indian and colonial botanists 

 working under its inspiration, will alone require an important chapter, and it will 

 need full knowledge and a wide vision to avoid inadequacy of treatment of its 

 powerful stimulus on all departments of post-Darwiuian' botany. The 'Genera 

 Plantarum,' the 'British Flora,' the "'Flora of India,' suffice to remind us of the pres- 

 tige of England in systematic botany, and the influence of the large and growing 

 library of local and colonial floras we owe to the labours of Bentham, Trimen, 

 Clarke, Oliver, Baker, Hemsley, Braudis, King, Gamble, Balfour, and the present 

 Director of Kew, is more than merely imperial. 



The progress in Europe and America of the other departments of hotauy has 

 been no less remarkable, and indeed histology and anatomy, comparative mor- 

 phology, and.the physiology and pathology of plants have perhaps advanced even 

 more rapidly, because tlie ground was newer. In England the work done at 

 Cambridge, South Kensington and elsewhere, and the publications in the • Annals 

 of Botany' and other journals sufficiently bear witness to this. A consequence has 

 been the specialisation which must soon be openly recognised — as it already is 

 tacitly — in botany as in zoological and other branches of science. 



No note has been more clearly sounded than this during the past twcuty-iive 

 years, as is evident to all who have seen the origin, rise, and progress of our modern 

 laboratories, special journals, and even the gradual subdivisions of this Association. 

 We may deplore this, as some deplore tlie departure of the days when a naturalist 

 was expected to teach geology, zoology, and botany as a matter of course ; but the 

 inevitable must come. Already the establishment of bacteriological laboratories 

 and a huge special literature, of zy mo-technical laboratories and courses on the 

 study of yeasts and mould fungi, of agricultural stations, forestry and dairy schools, 

 and so on — all these are signs of the inexorable results of progress. 



