128 



SCIENCE 



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



nut forest to disappear from our seaboard; 

 that the cultivation of a water plant woidd 

 choke the streams of England or render those 

 of Florida unnavigable ? The like is going on 

 all of the time without such results, and even 

 the man who knows speaks often to an un- 

 hearing audience when he ventures to pro- 

 claim that an immigrant can do what the 

 leopard moth has done to the elms of New 

 England or the boll-weevil to the sea-island 

 cotton : but the lesson is being learned, bit 

 by bit, and applied with quite as much zeal 

 as wisdom. 



In much this way, science has reached its 

 achievements: sometimes annexing large fields 

 that have proved less profitable than they were 

 advertised to be; sometimes finding itself in 

 possession of most fruitful territory that it 

 did not know it was invading. That the 

 mountains of conquest sometimes prove barren 

 and the drained plains of slow sedimentation 

 sometimes prove of inestimable productivity 

 may well lead us to embark in future on 

 the most lauded enterprise with reasonable 

 caution, and to foster in every wise way the 

 experimental prosecution of even the least ob- 

 viously promising of minor undertakings. 



Among newer lines of botanical activity 

 none stand out with more significant dis- 

 tinctness than those directed toward getting 

 conclusive demonstration of the active causes 

 of organic variation and of organic function 

 through a direct questioning of nature. To 

 such experimentation, the shifting theory and 

 complicated phenomena of physical chemistry 

 are fundamental; to it, the deftest and best 

 controlled manipulation is essential; to it, 

 recognition and successive elimination of the 

 many interwoven conditioning factors are in- 

 dispensable. From it, the subtle change that 

 converts living into dead matter is not capable 

 of separation. 



Biometry, laborious to the last degree, is the 

 scale by which some of its results are to be 

 made evident and coordinated. Biochemistry 

 has taken assured place as one of its most 

 necessary tools. Even the physical intricacies 

 of behavior in colloids that never figure in 

 vital phenomena are being pressed into daily 

 use as furnishing analogies for if not demon- 

 strations of the workings of that substance. 



protoplasm, which alone lives, alone responds 

 to stimulus in the sense of the physiologist, 

 and alone increases its substance through 

 nutrition. 



This entire line of advance is very new: 

 some of its progress is startling: but its final 

 results do not appear to promise to be those 

 of metamorphosis but rather of cumulative 

 mutations, perhaps mostly small. In it, above 

 all other lines of progress, caution, conser- 

 vatism and avoidance of too free generaliza- 

 tion and haste in announcing and applying 

 results appear to be desirable. 



It is natural that a science concerning 

 itself with the prime makers of human food — 

 and for that matter of all food, and of the 

 healing agents and poisons of the world, should 

 have gleaned its very first results from the use- 

 fulness or noxiousness of the materials of its 

 study, and that its achievements should have 

 acquired great economic importance. Too 

 much stress can not be laid on the fact that 

 this is so, and within reason too much can not 

 be expected from its future activities. 



This science works within the bounds of 

 what we sitill regard as natural law, and will 

 continue to be so limited however these boun- 

 daries may be defined and extended. Never- 

 theless because of its discoveries the unpal- 

 atable has been made palatable and the un- 

 wholesome made wholesome in food; two 

 blades of grass and two grains of wheat really 

 have been made to grow where but one grew 

 before; it has unraveled the mystery of the 

 epidemic scourges of farm and barnyard, has 

 pointed the way to prophylaxis and breeding 

 of hardier races, and at the worst, has shown 

 Where therapy is futile. It certainly will make 

 known and understood the critical periods in 

 crop growth, and enable the agronomist to 

 fositer and protect his crops with profit at these 

 periods; and it is not unlikely to enable the 

 man who knows to judge and score the grow- 

 ing crop as the growing herd is judged and 

 scored. It has founded a practise of self-sus- 

 taining fertility of the soil, and it points a way 

 to restoration of impoverished soils. 



These achievements have not come by leaps 

 and bounds of either discovery or application : 



