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K.—BOTANY. 213 
the seed testing station at Aberystwyth; and the stations at Long 
+ 
Ashton and Hast Malling. This incomplete recital shows no dearth of 
institutions and their development is all to the good. But there are a 
few dangers. The founders of new research institutions naturally expect 
results and may be unmindful of the fact that results cannot be 
commanded. This may react on the investigators who may be tempted 
to justify themselves by the dissemination of unripe fruit. Again, the 
promotion of applied research may tend to obscure the value of pure 
research. In this congregation of botanists there is no need to stress 
the adjectives, but there are some who are not entirely familiar with 
science and, therefore, do not always appreciate the potential value 
of a pure fact. They ask the question : “ What’s the good of it ?’ which 
was countered by Faraday by the question: ‘ What’s the good of a 
baby ?’ May I, in illustration, indicate the life histories of two babies ? 
The German chemist, Marggraf, discovered in 1747 that the white 
beet contained cane sugar. 
Some fifty years later, his pupil, Achard, cultivated the beet for the 
sake of its sugar. Thus on a small scale began the beet sugar industry 
in 1801. In the last phase of the Napoleonic wars, France was cut off 
from her colonies by the British blockade and thus was caused a sugar 
famine in France. Napoleon placed 70,000 acres of land under beet 
and founded schools for instruction in the methods of extracting and 
preparing the sugar. 
Many years ago Pasteur observed that glycerol was one of the products 
of the fermentation of sugar by yeast. 
During the Great War the Central Powers experienced a serious shortage 
of fats and thus of glycerol which is necessary for the making of dynamite. 
The simple fact was remembered and re-investigated by Connstein and 
Liidecke with the result that by the addition of sodium sulphite to the 
fermenting liquor the yield of glycerol was increased to 20 per cent. of the 
_ sugar used. 
Lastly, there is the comparative isolation of the workers from their 
academic brothers so that both lose a source of stimulation and ideas. 
These possible dangers will, for the most part, be eliminated if there be 
some connection, the closer the better, between the botanical departments 
of Universities and the research Institutions, accompanied by an 
occasional chiasmatypy of the workers in both. 
In the immediate past the supply of adequately trained men would 
appear to have fallen short of the demand: thus, a plant disease has been 
ascribed to an animal parasite which, on further investigation, proved to 
_be nothing more than the elongated nucleus of a tissue element of the 
phloem; the identification of certain drug-plants has been based on the 
anatomical characters of the leaves which characters vary in the individual 
plant and in plants grown in varying conditions of humidity ; and, finally, 
here is a quotation: ‘Trees are usually classified into two groups: (a) 
exogenous, those growing from a central sap supply, and (b) endogenous, 
those in which the sap flow is external. . . . The process of growth of a 
tree involves the formation of an annual layer of sap-wood immediately 
beneath the bark during the descending passage of the sap. . . . Radiating 
from the centre pith towards the bark are the ‘ medullary rays’ which 
