244 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 



'seventies, recorded last year by various writers in the ' New Phytologist, ' 

 was beginning to take effect in 1881, when the British Association met in 

 York. There the outstanding feature was the address of Hooker on 

 Geographical Distribution. This and the papers by Bayley Balfour on 

 Socotra and by Baker on Madagascar were all that really mattered 

 botanically, and almost all the contributions were systematic or regional 

 in subject. The revival of the laboratories had not yet fructified. At 

 this time all the work that was done in laboratories was called ' physiology,' 

 as distinct from systematic botany, which was conducted on dry specimens 

 in the herbarium. In 1887, six years after the York meeting, the ' Annals 

 of Botany ' was founded through the activity of Sir Isaac Bayley Balfour, 

 and a small committee of guarantors whose personal security induced the 

 Clarendon Press to make the venture. From the start that journal has 

 paid its way. The forty stately volumes form a record, between the 

 pages of which you may read the history of botanical progress in Britain, 

 and in some degree also in the United States, for American botanists have 

 always been with us in its pages. In the first issues of the 'Annals,' 

 morphology and systematic botany preponderated, and from the pro- 

 ceedings of the meeting of the Association in Oxford in 1894 we see that 

 this was still so. That meeting witnessed a crisis in the affairs of botany 

 in Britain. A newly established Section I of Physiology assumed that 

 the functional activities of plants would be swept, together with those of 

 animals, into its hands. Up to this time Section D had been the 

 undivided section of Biology. An irregular cleavage of interests was 

 set up by this claim, for the zoologists were mostly willing to give up 

 their physiology, but the botanists were not. Their refusal to accept 

 divorce of form from function contributed to, or at least coincided with, 

 the foundation of a separate Section K of Botany, and has dictated the 

 policy of British Botany ever since. 



As we pass from 1894 to the current period we perceive a marked 

 shifting of the interest of botanists from the study of form to that of the 

 intimate constitution and functional activity of plants. Whole fields of 

 colloidal chemistry and physics, of quantitative physiology, of cytology 

 and genetics, of ecology, of fungology and bacteriology, have been opened 

 up. The present century has been specially marked by the extension of 

 opportunities for physiological research, by better equipment of depart- 

 ments in the universities, and by the foundation of independent 

 establishments carrying on experimental inquiry in its broadest applica- 

 tion. This is rapidly bringing the science into closer relation with 

 Imperial and social aims. It is needless to specify, but the effect of it all 

 is plainly written in the pages of the ' Annals.' Experimental results have 

 gradually taken the preponderant place over description and comparison, 

 as is amply shown in the last January number. ' For better, for worse,' 

 the pendulum has definitely swung over from the extreme systematic 

 position of half a century ago, through a phase of prevalent morphology 

 (or perhaps we should better say of organography), to an extreme 

 physiological position at the present time. Some of you may even have 

 felt that this address is in itself an anachronism, in that it has not touched 

 upon the moving physiological questions of the day. While I may claim 

 none the less to sympathise with physiological aspirations, I do not 



