June 10, 1910] 



SCIENCE 



889 



training? There is danger of setting to 

 work a mental machine without giving it 

 suitable material upon which it may oper- 

 ate, and it reacts upon itself, resulting in a 

 sort of mental chaos. An active mind, 

 turned in upon itself, without any valuable 

 objective material, certainly can never 

 reach any very reliable results. It is the 

 trained scientific spirit which recognizes 

 that it is dangerous to stray away very far 

 from the facts, and that the farther one 

 strays away the more dangerous it becomes, 

 and almost inevitably leads to self-decep- 

 tion. 



It is such an attitude of mind that scien- 

 tific training is contributing to the service 

 of mankind. This does not mean that all 

 scientific men exhibit this attitude to the 

 full, but that it is their ideal. This ideal 

 has realized some tremendous results dur- 

 ing the last half century, and there is every 

 evidence that it is accumulating momen- 

 tum for a much larger expression. Com- 

 pared with this contribution, the material 

 usefulness of science seems tawdry. In 

 general, the world's standards of useful- 

 ness are tawdry, but education ought to 

 correct them rather than maintain them. 



The conclusion is that all science is im- 

 measurably useful, from fundamental to 

 superficial, on the material plane and on 

 the intellectual plane; and that in these 

 two regions of human need it is the most 

 valuable practical asset the world possesses. 

 John M. Coulter 



4 



BOTAWY IN ITS RELATIONS TO AGRWVL- 

 TUBAL ADVANCEMENT'' 



Few things are more interesting to one 

 of a philosophic east of mind, especially 

 if he be something of a botanist or agri- 

 culturist, than a growing collection of 

 plant varieties. However sluggish of in- 

 tellect one may be, such a collection— 



"^ Address of the retiring president before the 

 Botanical Society of Washington, March 5, 1910. 



representing forms developed in the long 

 history of the cultivator's art— is sure to 

 excite one's interest regarding their origin. 

 At first thought it would seem that as 

 practically all of the numerous varieties 

 that exist in cultivated plants have been 

 developed as it were under the eye of the 

 grower, we should have a pretty clear 

 understanding and agreement as to their 

 mode of origin. Yet few subjects have 

 proved more perplexing. The stock an- 

 swer of the breeder or gardener to one's 

 inquiries is usually embodied in the words 

 sports and hybrids. Is this answer ade- 

 quate? The enormous importance of the 

 subject, it would seem, should have in- 

 cited the most intensive study into the 

 problem. Few plants in their ordinary 

 wild forms wiU repay cultivation. It is 

 only through their improvement that a 

 permanent agriculture became possible. 

 The very baffling nature of the problems 

 presented, instead of attracting students, 

 seems to have repelled them. Systematic 

 botanists have looked upon cultivated 

 plant varieties as artificial products— use- 

 ful, no doubt, but utterly subversive to no- 

 tions of classification obtained from plants 

 in their natural habitats. Therefore, they 

 have been neglected and no plants are so 

 rare in museum collections as our common 

 cultivated ones. Such a thing as a reason- 

 ably complete herbariiim of cultivated 

 plant varieties nowhere exists. The nat- 

 ural result of this has been that the sys- 

 tematic botany of cultivated plants is in 

 woeful confusion. As a rule, numerous 

 botanical species have been based on 

 purely agricultural varieties, but in some 

 cases the opposite extreme is foiind and 

 perfectly distinct species are confused as 

 garden varieties. As a natural conse- 

 quence of this neglect by botanists, the 

 great mass of information we have con- 

 cerning any cultivated plant is largely 



