CHAPTER I 



SCIENCE AND SOCIETY. EXTERNAL AND INTERNAL 

 STRUCTURE OF THE PLANT 



It is not, I think, much beside the mark to say that the 

 word ' botanist ' still calls up in the minds of many 

 even well educated people not conversant with science 

 one of two pictures. Either they expect in the botanist 

 a tedious pedant with an inexhaustible vocabulary 

 of double-barrelled Latin names, sometimes most 

 barbarous, who is able to name at a glance any kind 

 of plant, and also ready on occasion, it may be, to 

 describe (quite incorrectly) their medicinal properties 

 — the type of botanist who bores one to death and is 

 certainly incapable of exciting any interest in his 

 subject : or, on the other hand, ' botanist ' depicts the 

 somewhat less sombre figure of the passionate lover of 

 flowers, who flits like a butterfly from one bloom to 

 another, admiring their bright colouring, inhaling their 

 perfume, singing the praises of the proud rose and the 

 modest violet — in other words, the elegant adept of 

 the amahilis scientia, as botany was called in olden 

 times. These are the two extreme types associated 

 in the minds of so many people with the word 

 ' botany,' and I am afraid I know it by personal experi- 

 ence ! A botanist is either a pedantic nomenclator or an 

 amateur horticulturist, an apothecary or an aesthete ; 

 but in no sense is he a man of science. The real man of 

 science seems to stand screened behind these types, 

 if such a person as a scientific botanist exists at all. 

 And, after all, what kind of science is botany ? What 

 are its aims ? What are the ideas which control it, 



A 



