February 5, 1915] 



SCIENCE 



211 



Gate therefore sometliirLg as to the age of this 

 latest and perhaps shortest stage of Lahontan 

 history, but they can hardly represent any- 

 thing more. Tufa deposits above the Pyramid 

 outlet level have no simple relation to the 

 quantity of salines now retained in Pyramid 

 waters, nor can any simple deduction be rea- 

 soned therefrom. If Pyramid Lake waters are 

 comparatively fresh, that is more likely to be 

 the result of freshening by overflow than of 

 freshening by desiccation. However, desicca- 

 tion of Lahontan waters and perhaps of con- 

 centrated saline solutions may have taken place 

 in the dry basins to the north. Large quan- 

 tities of salines were accumulated in an anal- 

 ogous system below the Owens River, and, 

 owing to natural relations there, they have not 

 since been covered up. There is a good chance 

 that similar deposits may have been formed in 

 some concentration sink of the Lahontan 

 Basin, which have since been buried in playa 

 muds. 



HoYT S. Gale 

 Washington, D. C. 



botany in the agricultural colleges 

 Dr. E. B. Copeland's article in Science for 

 September 18, 1914, entitled " Botany in the 

 Agricultural College," opens up for discussion 

 a many-sided problem of high pedagogical 

 importance to agriculture. While we may 

 agree to the definition " that the raising of 

 crops is essentially nothing more or less than 

 applied botany," it is a pitiful commentary 

 that what we know of the raising of crops has 

 in the main been gained without the help of the 

 botanist. Indeed, one of our best-known Amer- 

 ican botanists contends that problems of crop 

 production may safely be left wholly to the 

 argonomist and horticulturist. 



The chemist infinitely more than the botan- 

 ist has interested himself in the great problem 

 of securing a larger crop return from the 

 soil. Indeed one must give high credit to the 

 chemists for the insistent efforts they have 

 made to bring their science into affiliation 

 with all other sciences and with practical indus- 

 tries. We. have to-day almost endless sub- 

 divisions of chemistry, such as biological chem- 



istry, agricultural chemistry, engineering 

 chemistry, physiological chemistry, bacterio- 

 logical chemistry, etc. There is hardly a line 

 of human endeavor to which the chemist has 

 not striven to apply his knowledge in a prac- 

 tical way. Much of the so-called agricul- 

 tural chemistry is more properly plant physiol- 

 ogy, but chemists have occupied the field with 

 scarcely a protest from botanists. In striking 

 contrast to the chemist, botanists have shrunk 

 from what should be the major application of 

 their science; namely, that of crop production. 

 A marked exception is plant pathology along 

 which line the best contributions of botanists 

 to agriculture have been made. In very recent 

 years the study of genetics as applied to agri- 

 cultural crops also promises to produce much 

 of high economic value. It is true that there 

 are numerous texts purporting to treat of agri- 

 cultural botany, but they are mostly of a char- 

 acter creditable to neither agriculture nor 

 botany. The best texts that relate to agri- 

 cultural botany or at least to crop production 

 have been written not by botanists but by 

 chemists. 



Perhaps no one really questions that the 

 study of the factors that go to make crop pro- 

 duction is the province of plant ecology and 

 of plant physiology, including genetics, but 

 one may search the whole literature of these 

 subjects without finding a single paper devoted 

 to the relation of any one environmental factor 

 to quantity and quality of yield, the very thing 

 with which crop production is concerned. 

 Botanists seem scarcely to have realized that 

 yield is a measurable result of the same sort as 

 the rate of growth, or the amount of water 

 transpired, or of carbon assimilated. 



Our actual knowledge of the relation of 

 factors both external and internal to yield is 

 very largely the work of non-botanists. In- 

 deed, excepting for the work of chemists it is 

 still largely confined to the facts gathered by 

 actual experience in the growing of crops, most 

 of it antedating the development of modem 

 science. 



Since the advent of modern science six great 

 discoveries or lines of advance have contributed 

 to greater crop production or at least to a 



