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SCIENCE. 



[Vol. XX. No. 495 



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MODERN BOTANY.' 



BY CHARLES R. BARNES, PROFESSOR OF BOTANY IN THE UNIVERSITT 

 OF WISCONSIN. 



I VENTURE to say that the ideas conjured up by the words 

 "botany" and "botanists" in the minds of those of you 

 whose school days ceased anywhere from fifteen to twenty 

 years ago, or perhaps even at a later date, will be one which 

 is very widely different from the ideas that those words 

 ought to bring up. To most people the word " botany " re- 

 calls something which chiefly means the collecting of flow- 

 ering plants in the spring; pulling flowers to pieces in an 

 endeavor, too often a vain endeavor, to find out a long, hard 

 name for the plant; an endeavor which is often vain unless 

 they have acquired the very useful trick of looking in the 

 index for the common name. The word " botanist" brings 

 to mind a sort of harmless crank who spends most of his 

 time in wandering about fields and woods and poking into 

 swamps and bringing home arms full or boxes full of plants; 

 perchance drying them and preserving them. Yet these two 

 ideas are so extremely foreign to the subject of botany as it 

 is thought of to-day, that I venture to present to you some 

 hints of what modern botany is, and particularly what mod- 

 ern botany is on its economic side. The study that I have 

 indicated as being the common one is the study of a part 

 only of botany ; one to be sure which is not without its value; 

 but it is only the most elementary part of the subject. It 

 was very natural that when people began, in the revival of 

 learning, and at the close of the middle ages, to study plants, 

 they should first turn their attention to the plants which 

 were nearest at hand, and to those plants which attracted 

 their attention most readily on account of their size. So we 

 find that the early studies of plants are almost exclusively 

 an attempt to describe and classify; at first simply to de- 

 scribe the plants which one found about him; later to ascer- 

 tain what the relations of these plants to each other were. 



> An address delivered before the State Agricultural Society of Wisconsin, 

 Feb. 1, 1892 ; stenographlcally reported and published by permission of the 

 secretary In advance of the volume of Proceedings for the year. 



From that day until the present this study and classification 

 of the higher plants has been almost the only subject to 

 which any very great attention has been given. In our own 

 country the people who came toil, if they had had any train- 

 ing at all in botany, had been impressed with the importance 

 of the same ideas. They had come to a new country. It 

 was their first duty to make known to those abroad who were 

 studying plants, what the flora of this country was ; and, from 

 the year 1750 on, collections of great number and often of 

 considerable value went across the water. 



From 1750 to late in the present century little attention 

 was given to any other department of botany; and it is only 

 within the last ten or fifteen years that descriptive botany 

 has had any competitors for favor. In Germany, however, 

 the matter is widely different; it has been a much longer 

 time since systematic botany, the study of plants as far as 

 their classification is concerned, was the only topic which 

 attracted attention. The reason of this is perfectly evident. 

 People exhausted the subject to a certain degree in that coun- 

 try, and they then naturally turned their attention to some 

 other phase of plant study. Germany and France stand far 

 in advance of this country to-day in the investigations which 

 their botanists have pursued, solely because of the longer 

 time during which they have been at work, and the greater 

 amount of time which each investigator is able to give to his 

 own special subject. 



But students nowadays are not expected to collect flowers 

 and find out their names and then congratulate themselves 

 that they have studied botany. They are put to work with 

 the microscope to see the very minutest arrangement of the 

 complicated machinery of plants. They are set to work with 

 the pencil to delineate these arrangements; to record their 

 observation in a way Which appeals at once to the eye, with- 

 out the intervention of words; and, in spite of the repeated 

 assertion that they cannot draw, they are told to do the very 

 thing which they cannot do until they have learned how to 

 do it. They are asked to equip themselves with chemical 

 and physical knowledge, in order that they may be able to 

 study this machinery in action ; and when they have attained 

 a sufficient knowledge of other sciences, then, and then only, 

 can they expect to unravel some of the mysteries of plant 

 life, in many ways the least mysterious of organic things. 



Now, what is the object and purpose of such training as 

 this ? First, it is to develop skill of eye, hand, and brain. 

 It is to bring to them something of those qualities to which 

 the essayist of the evening alluded. It is to enable them to 

 see in the material things around them something more than 

 bits of matter. It is to enable them to gain that bi-eadth of 

 comprehension and grasp of intellect which it is desirable 

 that every educated man should attain. I hope, therefore, 

 that the members of this society will use their utmost en- 

 deavor to have this sort of vital and vitalizing study com- 

 menced in the schools below the college and university; in 

 what we may call the primary schools as contrasted with the 

 secondary ones. Most of the high schools in the State to-day, 

 I am sorry to say, are studying this subject in the same way 

 in which it was studied twenty-five years ago, and they are 

 doing this work partly because they have had no pull from 

 higher schools to lift them to a higher level, and partly be- 

 cause they know no better way. 



On its economic side this sort of training has its chief 

 value, and it is that, I take it, in which the members of this 

 society are mainly interested. Let me select a few topics 

 from the very great number at my disposal in order to illus- 

 trate to you, if I can, just what the economic bearing of this 



