Januaby 2, 1920] 



SCIENCE 



of other special fields under cultivation, some 

 of which will certainly interlock with his own 

 field. To meet this situation will demand 

 more careful attention to the training of in- 

 vestigators than it has received. Interested 

 and even submerged in our own work, as 

 we must be, still we must realize that the 

 would-be investigator must develop his atmos- 

 phere as well as his technique, or he will 

 remain medieval. 



To be more concrete, the morphologist in 

 the coming days must appreciate the relation 

 that physiology and ecology hold to his own 

 field. This is far from meaning that he must 

 be trained in physiological and ecological in- 

 vestigation ; but he must know its possibilities. 

 The same statement applies in turn to the 

 physiologist and ecologist, and so on through 

 the whole list of specialties. 



This first forecast of the future applies to 

 ■the necessary training of investigators rather 

 than to investigation itself. 



2. A second important feature that is sure 

 to be included in the botanical investigation 

 of the future is cooperation in research. 

 During the last few years the desirability of 

 cooperation has been somewhat stressed, and 

 perhaps the claims for it have been urged 

 somewhat unduly. This was natural when we 

 were desiring to secure important practical 

 results as rapidly as possible. It opened up, 

 however, the possibilities of the future. I^o 

 one questions but that individual research, to 

 contrast it with cooperative research, must 

 continue to break the paths of our progress. 

 Men of ideas and of initiative must continue 

 to express themselves in their own way, or the 

 science woiild come to resemble field cultiva- 

 tion rather than exploration. It is in this 

 way that all our previous progress has been 

 made. The new feature is that individual re- 

 search will be increasingly supplemented by 

 cooperative research. There are two situa- 

 tions in which cooperative research will play 

 an important role. 



The more important situation is the case 

 of a problem whose solution obviously re- 

 quires two or more kinds of special technique. 

 There are many problems, for example, which 

 a morphologist and a physiologist should at- 



tack in cooperation, because neither one of 

 them alone could solve it. Two detached and 

 unrelated papers would not meet the situ- 

 ation. Our literatm-e is burdened with too 

 many such contributions now. The one tech- 

 nique must be a continual check on the other 

 during the progress of the investigation. 

 This is a very simple illustration of what may 

 be called team work. It is simply a practical 

 application of our increasing realization of 

 the fact that problems are often synthetic, and 

 therefore involve a synthetic attack. 



Another simple illustration may be sug- 

 gested. If taxonomists and geneticists should 

 work now and then in cooperation, the result 

 might be either fewer species or more species; 

 but in any event they would be better species. 

 The experience of botanists can suggest many 

 other useful couplings in the interest of better 

 results. In the old days some of you will re- 

 call that we had investigations of soil bacteria 

 unchecked by any work in chemistry; and side 

 by side with this were investigations in soil 

 chemistry unchecked by any work with soil 

 bacteria. 



Perhaps the most conspicuous illustration of 

 discordant conclusions through lack of co- 

 operation, so extreme that it may be called 

 lack of coordination, may be found in the 

 fascinating and baffling field of phylogeny. 

 To assemble the whole plant kingdom, or at 

 least a part of it, in evolutionary sequence has 

 been the attempt of a considerable number of 

 botanists, and no one of them, as yet, has 

 taken into consideration even all the known 

 facts. There is the paleobotanist who rightly 

 stresses historical succession, with which of 

 course any evolutionary sequence must be con- 

 sistent, but who can not be sure of his identi- 

 fications, and still less sure of the essential 

 structures involved. History is desirable, but 

 some real knowledge of the actors who make 

 history is even more desirable. 



Then there is the morphologist, who stresses 

 similarity of structures, especially reproduc- 

 tive structures, and leaves out of sight not 

 only accompanying structures but also his- 

 torical succession. 



Latest in the field is the anatomist, espe- 

 cially the vascular anatomist, who compares 



