60 T O R R E Y A 



basic services. It is this type of individual who knows his plants and who 

 knows plant relationships who can serve to great advantage, for his accumu- 

 lated store of special knowledge cannot be matched by those botanists trained 

 and experienced in other fields remote from that of taxonomy and systematic 

 botany. Let us hope that those charged with selection for super-specialized 

 services such as those indicated in this field of botanical analogy, will select 

 wisely and well. After all there is much truth in the popular conception of what 

 a botanist is — an individual who knows and can name plants ; yet the vastly 

 higher percentage of our professional botanists have almost no knowledge and 

 less experience in this specialized field of taxonomy, and many of them have no 

 interest in it. They are for the most part specialists in totally different branches 

 under the all-inclusive term botany, for in our times the term botanist covers 

 not only the taxonomist and systematist. but also the fields of morphology, 

 physiology, ecology, cyto-genetics. cytology, histology and various other 

 subdivisions ; the numerous devotees to these subdivisions of botany are all 

 "botanists" in spite of the popular definition cited above. A very high percent- 

 age of them would be utterly lost were they to be assigned to special problems in 

 this distinctly complicated field of botanical analogy. 



\\'ithin the field of medicine or pharmacology, here is a simple illustrative 

 case. The European Digitalis pnrf^nrca Linn, is the source of an important drug, I 

 digitalin. and we have generally depended on Europe for our supply. With 

 these supplies now cut off by the war, local sources must be developed. I 

 have no idea of how extensively the plant is now cultivated in the northern 

 L'nited States, but Fernald, on the basis of his own extensive field knowledge, 

 calls attention to the fact that the species is not only thoroughly established in 

 certain parts of Newfoundland, but that in places it is dominant and a 

 veritable pest ; a source of supply that only needs to be tapped if there be 

 need to build up our dwindling stocks, and an indication that certain parts 

 of Newfoundland are ideally adapted to the actual cultivation of the species on a 

 large scale if this be needed. 



It is clear to all taxonomists and all systematic botanists, that in spite of 

 the imperfections in our current system of naming and describing plant 

 species, and in spite of the distinctly Rafinesquian character of the work of 

 certain individual botanists who can see differences where tangible dift'erences 

 scarcely exist, that taxonomy and the accurate identification of plants is basic 

 to a proper understanding of myriads of problems in the general field of 

 economic botany, pharmacolog}-, agriculture, plant breeding, plant pathology, 

 genetics, forestry, morphology, physiology, and many other fields into which 

 plant science or botany scnsit latiore has been subdivided. We have little 

 patience with the investigator, no matter what his problem may be, who ignores 

 this basic problem of accurate identification of the material with which he 



