260 SECTIONAL fADDRESSES. 
the plant kingdom, and has correspondingly neglected the newer know- 
ledge of process which must be the main avenue to a deeper under- 
standing of plants. Fortunately there are now many signs of impend- 
ing change. Meanwhile the younger workers, dissatisfied, especially 
during the last two decades, with the older outlook, have turned more 
and more to specialised physiological research, to mycology or to 
genetics, with their outlets on practical life, but often without the 
grounding that only a thorough grasp of the essentials of the subject 
can give. One of the results has been that botany has to a large extent 
become disintegrated, workers in particular parts of the subject haying 
little understanding and less interest in the results of their fellow- 
workers in other parts. It may be said that this is an inevitable result 
of the complication of the subject, and no doubt that is partly true. 
There is a type of professional worker who, having once got immersed 
in a particular line of research, resolutely refuses ever to come out of 
his groove and take a broader view. The subject no doubt owes a 
great deal of its energetic detailed development to such workers. But 
if botany, as the science of plants, is to retain any meaning as a whole, 
somebody must retain the power of looking at it as a whole. And if, 
as teachers, we fail to keep touch with the newer developments, and 
are consequently no longer able to focus the whole subject from a 
viewpoint determined by current knowledge, this power will come to 
be possessed by fewer and fewer botanists, and the subject will definitely 
and finally break up into a number of specialised and unco-ordinated 
pursuits. ; . 
Do we want that to happen? I think that most botanists would 
answer ‘No!’ JI do not think there can be any question that the most 
advanced research worker, as well as the student who never goes on to 
research, benefits substantially by having had a training which is at 
once the broadest and the most vital that is possible. As science con- 
tinuously advances and necessarily specialises, the unexplored fields 
which lie between the traditional lines of research become of more and 
more relative importance. They cannot receive adequate attention— 
the student can, indeed, hardly become aware of their existence—unless 
his introduction to the subject is continuously informed by the widest 
outlook and the clearest apprehension of the essential relations of the 
phenomena of plant life. 
