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SCIENCE 



£N. S. Vol. XL VI. No. 1200 



application, closer scrutiny or observation 

 and related the exercises to function. It has 

 failed, however, in not educating in terms 

 of the vegetable kingdom. We now see that 

 the best educational procedure for botany 

 in schools is a good combination of inten- 

 sive laboratory work indoors, with carefully 

 planned field and systematic work. The 

 field naturalist contributes the factor of 

 leadership in addition to drill with sub- 

 ject-matter; under his care, the environ- 

 ment of both men and other organisms be- 

 gins to express itself. This, of course, is as 

 true in zoology as in botany; in fact, good 

 field work is both zoology and botany. 

 This kind of field and collecting work pro- 

 vides the best approach to nature. To 

 know a cell or a spore is of much less sig- 

 nificance to the major part of mankind 

 than to know a plant. 



Some of the disdain of descriptive and 

 taxonomic effort is due to the feeling, which 

 is not without justification, that much of 

 the so-called systematic work is little more 

 than the personal naming and re-naming 

 of specimens, without the addition of new 

 knowledge or the expression of new mean- 

 ings ; the work is therefore likely to be dis- 

 regarded, as irrelevant and not worth the 

 while. 



The systematist has also lost sympathy 

 with many of his cotnpeers because of the 

 controversies over nomenclature. The im- 

 pression has gone abroad that he deals 

 only with names. The controversies in this 

 field issue from two mistaken premises on 

 the part of nomenclatorialists — the as- 

 sumption that nomenclature can be codi- 

 fied into invariable law, and the practise of 

 making rules retroactive. Varying prac- 

 tises in language tend in these days toward 

 agreement and unification, the persisting 

 variations being mostly in minor matters; 

 as soon, however, as anj^ superimposed au- 

 thority undertakes to enforce rigidity, re- 



bellion is invited and differences are likely 

 to be organized into counter codifications. 

 It is probably not even desirable to have 

 rigidity in binomial nomenclature for 

 plants. The reactionary nature of the 

 rules is their greatest fault, however, and 

 is responsible for most of the mischief. It 

 upsets good practise, on which the litera- 

 ture rests, even as far back as Linnaeus. 

 Acts of legislatures, regulations of govern- 

 ment, ordinances, entrance requirements to 

 colleges and other enactments, become opera- 

 tive at a specified future date. The names 

 of plants are vested rights to the users of 

 them in literature, and there is no moral 

 warrant for changing those of times past 

 merely that they may conform to a rule of 

 the present. If the practise were in the 

 realm of enacted law involving property, 

 any court would declare it illegal. I intro- 

 duce this discussion to say that the changes 

 in nomenclature are not a necessary part 

 of systematic work except in so far as they 

 result from changed biological conceptions 

 of genera and species. 



THE WORK OF THE SYSTEMATIST 



With this preface, I may enter my sub- 

 ject, which is the place of the systematist 

 in present-day natural history. I shall 

 naturally speak in terms of plants, but I 

 trust that some of you will make the exten- 

 sion to terms of animals. 



To know the forms of life is the primary 

 concern of the biologist. This knowledge 

 is the basis of all study in morphology, 

 physiology, heredity and phylogeny. Un- 

 doubtedly much of the looseness of state- 

 ment and incorrect inference in writings on 

 variation and heredity are due to the very 

 inexact definition of the forms about which 

 we talk. Much of the non sequitur lies 

 here. Literature is undoubtedly full of 

 examples. Every discouragement of the 



