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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. LI. No. 1310 



arbitrary boundaries than some of lis to-day 

 are satisfied with an arbitrary zero-date for 

 the scientific naming of plants when it is evi- 

 dent that scientific nomenclature began in part 

 at a much earlier date. 



Without the natiu-e-philosophy of Aristotle 

 there would have been no starting point for 

 the systematization of Theophrastus. Tet 

 without centuries of knowledge accumulated 

 through human exi)erience there would have 

 been no background for either. They were 

 the men who through systematization and 

 coordination made the known understood, and 

 thus opened knowable paths into what for 

 them was the unknovm. 



It was a little incursion led, after a thou- 

 sand and more years of mental vegetation, by 

 a few nature-loving men of the Ehineland 

 across the old boundaries. Though their day 

 was that of revolt against theologically re- 

 stricted thought, these resurrectors of a buried 

 but not yet dead science were free-thinkers 

 rather than protestants when they turned 

 from canonized books to a real examination 

 of nature. They were few in number and at 

 first isolated in action; their excursions did 

 not lead them far from home, but they were 

 joined early by others, and their spirit found 

 an instant echo in the sunny south. Instead 

 of remaining explorers they became leaders of 

 little bands whose small advances and retreats 

 cleared the way for advance after advance of 

 the usually better organized and at times 

 better led army of searchers after the truth 

 who in due time became known as botanists, 



Small wonder if this growing army saw its 

 legitimate opportunity less comprehensively 

 and less clearly than we see it nearly five 

 hundred years after the movement started! 

 Without such pioneers, the science of botany 

 might have remained to this day within the 

 bounds that Theophrastus found to encompass 

 it over two thousand years ago. Without 

 other, later, even more venturesome pioneers, 

 what they saw in it might remain to us as its 

 present content. 



Back of their activities was the incentive 

 that imderlay these, the unquenchable human 

 thirst for knowledge. Through the following 

 centuries this has operated side by side with 



the equally ineradicable human instinct for 

 leaving well enough alone; and men have 

 progressed dominated and restrained by the 

 massive inertia of conservatism, but break- 

 ing free every now and then for a trial of 

 the individual inertia of motion, much as a 

 molecule of evaporating water passes off into 

 freedom — ultimately to be lost in space, to 

 enter into a new cycle, or to return to the 

 bondage from which it made its escape, with 

 far-reaching derangement in any case of the 

 stability of what it left behind or joined. 



Effort, when really effective, is purposeful. 

 When the microscope provided means of see- 

 ing clearly what living beings consist of, it 

 was not Hooke, who first published its revela- 

 tions, but Malpighi and Grew, who shortly 

 afterward examined the structure of living 

 things with a view to understanding their 

 vital processes, who laid the foundation for a 

 broader science than their predecessors had 

 conceived. They and their followers, in plan- 

 ning and building on the lines that we now 

 recognize from long habit as being those that 

 characterize botany, did not go far from the 

 procedure that has distinguished successful 

 human effort in general, in which a search 

 after the true and the effective has shaped 

 itself usually into a quest for proof or disproof 

 of some theory of what is true or effective. 



Without the guiding line of philosophy, the 

 search might or might not have reached its 

 goal. But with it, the result has depended 

 upon adaptation of the means to the end — 

 an adaptation which in our own day and in 

 the last quarter-century has grown with sur- 

 prising rapidity and extension of the experi- 

 mental questioning of nature to which science 

 turns with confidence for the solution of those 

 problems that really lie within its field. Be- 

 yond that field still lies the realm of meta- 

 physical speculation, which Lewes, half a cen- 

 tury ago, protested against calling philosophy 

 because in this sense he felt constrained to call 

 the restless motion of philosophic speculation 

 rotary in contrast with the linear (perhaps 

 one would rather say dendritic) progress of 

 science. The lure of the pioneer lies in the 

 prospect of novel as well as great return. A 

 few years ago some botanists were discussing 



