February 12, 1915] 



SCIENCE 



225 



dents are demanding more practical 

 courses or are going elsewhere through 

 failure to find them with us, and what is 

 more, an increasing number of schools are 

 demanding- teachers with more practical 

 training than we have been supplying. 

 Last summer one of our graduates, well 

 trained in theoretical botany, was ofifered 

 a position if she could teach agriculture. 

 Fortunately we had imported a professor 

 of agriculture for the summer, and the 

 young lady took a hurried course, and se- 

 cured the position. An increasing number 

 of opportunities are offered to qualified 

 graduates prepared to take up work in 

 agricultural colleges and experiment sta- 

 tions, and a relatively decreasing number 

 of places are available in theoretical bot- 

 any. 



If the situation above depicted is a gen- 

 eral movement rather than a passing 

 whim, it is evident that in many of our 

 institutions botany to remain a living force 

 must change its methods. It may, as did 

 Latin and C4reek, stand inflexibly for past 

 ideals and decline, or it may adjust itself 

 to present-day problems and live with in- 

 creasing vitality. We must not be de- 

 ceived by the fact that more of us than 

 ever before are engaged in the pursuit of 

 theoretical botany. It is not a question of 

 absolute, but of relative, numbers, and by 

 that test theoretical botany is losing. For 

 one, I mourn the passing of Greek and 

 Latin. To me those languages have been 

 immensely practical and I do not at all re- 

 gret the seven years I employed in their 

 study. Yet how much better off we all 

 would be had the classics, as we took them, 

 been related to our modern life ! And they 

 might have been so related, for there are 

 many points of contact, but your teachers 

 and mine held rigidly for classics for the 

 classics' sake and for disciplinary values; 

 and it is for this that they have fallen. 



At Chicago, we still adhere to the an- 

 cient notion that the A.B. degree should 

 stand for training in the classics, and the 

 result, of course, is a great decline in A.B. 

 graduates. Some convocations pass with- 

 out a single student taking that degree. 

 One day I asked one of our professors of 

 Latin if the slump in Latin and Greek were 

 general and permanent or merely local 

 and temporary, and he replied with sad- 

 ness: "I feel that it is world-wide and 

 lasting; even Oxford feels it. Almost the 

 only ray of hope for us is that the botan- 

 ists still require the diagnoses of species to 

 be in Latin." 



It would be a world tragedy if theoret- 

 ical botany should die, or even if it were 

 to be less influential than it is at present. 

 It is vastly more important than are Greek 

 and Latin, and yet their decline is to be 

 contemplated with profound regret. But 

 botany is the foundation of agriculture, 

 and agriculture is the most fundamental 

 employment of the human race. 



To be sure, we can farm without being 

 botanists, but we can not farm so well. 

 Through the ages agricultural man has 

 stumbled on many important facts and 

 principles that the botanist has later on 

 explained, thus making more scientific 

 farming possible. "Witness the enrichment 

 of land by growing leguminous crops — a 

 fact mentioned by Pliny, and explained by 

 modern botany, and as a result utilized 

 with vastly increased success by the pres- 

 ent-day agriculturist. Witness, too, the 

 history of our knowledge of the wheat rust, 

 or the recently discovered hereditary 

 symbiosis of bacteria and seed plants — phe- 

 nomena seen by agriculturists as in a glass, 

 but very, very darkly until the theoretical 

 botanists explained them. 



In spite of these instances and a hun- 

 dred more, the practical man is coming 

 increasingly to look with scorn upon the 



