10 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXVII. No. 940 



experiment stations as permanent parts of 

 the botanical equipment of the country. 

 They will be with us in the future, and 

 their results will continue to be added to 

 botanical knowledge. We must accept 

 them as a part of our scientific equipment, 

 and help to make them more efficient. It 

 will not do for us to stand aloof, and decry 

 their results as not accurate, and as agri- 

 cultural instead of botanical. When we 

 fully realize that we have in these experi- 

 ment stations so many institutions of en- 

 dowed research, we shall not hesitate to wel- 

 come them to the ranks of science. The 

 fact that these researches in regard to 

 plants so often have an economic purpose 

 does not lessen the value of the results to 

 the botanist of broad training and sympa- 

 thies. Here again we must remember that 

 as botanists we should not undervalue those 

 contributions to knowledge in which we 

 happen not to have an immediate interest. 

 My scriptural quotation of a few minutes 

 ago might well be repeated here: "the eye 

 can not say to the hand ' I have no need of 

 thee, ' or again the head to the feet ' I have 

 no need of you.' " When they receive the 

 hearty cooperation of the botanists of the 

 country the agricultural experiment sta- 

 tions will develop into centers of investi- 

 gation of the greatest importance to sci- 

 ence. 



Already we have stations for the study of 

 plants under particular environments, as 

 our seaside stations, our mountain stations 

 and a single desert station. I take it that 

 these are suggestive of what are to come in 

 the future. Instead of trying to make sea- 

 side conditions away from the sea, we go to 

 the sea and there set up our laboratories. 

 So when we want to know how plants be- 

 have in the desert we go to the desert. And 

 this is no doubt to be the direction of bo- 

 tanical investigation. We are going to 

 study plants under their natural environ- 



ment, and to the seaside laboratories we 

 shall add (as indeed we have already to a 

 limited extent) lakeside laboratories, river- 

 side laboratories, swamp laboratories, for- 

 est laboratories, field laboratories. Al- 

 ready the tropical laboratories, in Java, 

 Ceylon and Jamaica have justified them- 

 selves, and no doubt to these we shall soon 

 add arctic and tundra laboratories. All this 

 signifies that more and more we are going 

 to see what the plant is doing in its natural 

 environment, and then we can undertake 

 intelligently to watch it under a changed 

 environment. So the future is to witness 

 a great increase in the number of these lab- 

 oratories, and how far it will go can only 

 be conjectured. It now appears probable 

 that eventually every botanical department 

 will have one or more of these environ- 

 mental laboratories in which work may be 

 done by advanced students. They will take 

 the students out of doors, as the old-time 

 systematic botany took them out, but these 

 students will go equipped with thermom- 

 eters, psychrometers, anemometers and bal- 

 ances, instead of vascula and plant presses. 

 Thus we shall again go afield, but on what 

 a different quest ! The old-time botanist in 

 the field was mainly concerned with the 

 question of the specific identity of each 

 plant he foun'd; the botanist afield in the 

 future will ask what the plants are doing 

 under this or that environment. He will 

 not neglect the earlier question, in fact he 

 must have that answered, but that an- 

 swered he has still his main question be- 

 fore him. The work in the field labora- 

 tories must necessarily be ©f the kind now 

 called ecological, and so as I see it the bot- 

 any of the future will have much more of 

 ecology than is common to-day. 



Tet when we think of these botanical sta- 

 tions whose laboratories are taken afield, as 

 it were, we must not suppose for a moment 

 that the old-time laboratories on the uni- 



