EDITORIAL 



Our readers will note with considerable pleasure that a 

 larger number of contributors are taking part in the making of 

 this magazine. We join them in hoping that this assistance will 

 continue. Though single new facts about plants are so abundant 

 as to be found by anybody for the looking, and often appear of 

 themselves, it is a most difficult thing to induce the finder to 

 wTite up his experiences for publication. We have not yet got 

 clearly in mind the fact that mere bigness is no measure of the 

 value of an observation. It is probably human to want to fill 

 as much space as possible and tO' disdain what may appear 

 trivial from its size. Even the small fish in the botanical schools 

 aspire to talk like w^hales. We see this exemplified in our 

 technical journals w^here some embryo DeVries, after digging 

 around in a University for a year or two, emerges wath a bunch 

 of formidable data and proceeds to write what appears to be 

 a very learned article, yet a close inspection often shows that 

 all it contains that is really new can be cut down to a single 

 paragraph, such as we publish in this magazine. Often an 

 entire book may be so cut down, the superfluous matter con- 

 sisting of uninteresting data upon which the author bases his 

 conclusions. New facts, however, are of the utmost import- 

 ance. Little by little they accumulate until some scientist more 

 far-sighted than his fellows discovers that by fitting the facts 

 together, the science may be greatly advanced at one bound. 

 Nearly all great advances have come about in this way. Dar- 

 win is wrongly credited with the theory of descent named for 

 him. Long before he was born the facts pointing toward such 



