June, I92I] ARTHUR — SPECIALIZATION AND FUNDAMENTALS 2/7 
impartially from all the people would feel that their first obligation was to 
the public, at least to the scientific part of the public. But such is the 
insidious influence of centralized power, or, as G. R. Lyman says, "the 
zeal of public service," that in some quarters the wealth of opportunity and 
material are guarded with miserly oversight for the advancement of par- 
ticular workers and the prestige of the organization. I am not speaking of 
the individual. There are always a few lacking in a nice sense of propriety 
and the distinction of meum and tuum, who must be guarded against. 
My experience leads me to believe, however, that they are few in botanical 
circles, both in this country and abroad. What I have in mind is the spirit 
of exclusiveness, the dog-in-the-manger policy, which should be frowned 
upon, and so far as possible eradicated from all efficient and truly demo- 
cratic centers for scientific work. Otherwise, how are we to bear out Har- 
vey's admonition ''to continue in mutual love and affection" for "the 
honor of the profession?" The man of science should be able to appreciate 
and exemplify what Chaucer means when he says of his knight, that 
he loved chivalry, 
Truth and honor, freedom and courtesy. 
At the present day all botanists are specialists. The expansion of the 
science under many diversified heads, linking it up with other sciences, 
and the desire to excel in some restricted field, rather than to be content 
with the level of general information, doubtless explains much of this 
tendency. With increase in the number of botanical workers has come an 
increase in the number of organizations bearing distinctive titles. So 
speedy and intense has been this movement that it has carried some of the 
younger members of the profession quite off their feet, and in the rarefied 
atmosphere of their new environment they no longer see the solid earth 
from which the maintenance of their strength must come. Oh, no! they 
say, I am not a botanist, I am a pathologist, an ecologist, a geneticist, or 
what not. Let us hope that the allurements of the silver-lined clouds of 
science will not keep them from eventually considering the mists that bedew 
the earth and renew its verdure. 
Probably the most fundamental thing that^ the specialist is likely to 
neglect is an intimate acquaintance with the plants with which he deals. 
When the distinctive instrument of the botanist's labors was the vasculum, 
now rarely seen, and to be credited with a knowledge of elementary botany 
required one to pass in fifty named and mounted specimens, only the 
indolent niissed a suitable basis for botanical advancement. When the 
microscope became the botanist's chief instrument, the foundations began 
to be neglected in the construction of the multivaried details of the super- 
structure. With the advent of other instruments of research, the microtome, 
the auxanometer, the atmometer, etc., attention was directed more and 
more away from the individual plant as an interesting inhabitant of the 
