324 
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF BOTANY 
[Vol. 8, 
genetics, the science of the origin and expression of characters, the sum 
total of which makes up the organism as we know it. 
Because of the symposium arrangement, it is necessary to restrict the 
treatment of the theme so as not to trench on the subjects assigned to my 
colleagues. Dr. Cowles and Dr. Stevens. Omitting their topics, the re- 
lation of ecology and of pathology, respectively, to human welfare, there 
remain the morphology, physiology (aside from environment), and genetics 
of crop plants, as well as pharmacology or pharmaceutical botany. 
At the start we are confronted by the well-known dictum of one class 
of botanists that, whenever botany relates in any way to human welfare, 
by that very fact it ceases to be botany. One is reminded of the famous 
couplet written in similar vein : 
My name is Benjamin Jowett, 
Master of Balliol College, 
Whatever is known, I know it, 
Whatever I don't, i^n't knowledge. 
It may be argued that this dictum is but a theory, a state of mind. To 
those who cherish that delusion it should be necessary only to point out a 
few striking facts of the botanical past and present. 
Development of Botanical Science 
Until comparatively recent years practically all botanists studied wild 
and domesticated plants impartially. This was true of the Greek philos- 
opher-naturalist, Theophrastus, of the third century B.C., the father of 
modern descriptive botany. It was true of the Greek physician, Dios- 
corides, and of the Roman, Varro, in the first century B.C., and of the Roman 
essayist, Pliny, in the first century of the present era. It remained true of 
botanists in general until toward the middle of the nineteenth century, or 
some 75 to lOO years ago. 
With the revival of learning after the Dark Ages came a renewed ex- 
pression of interest in things botanical. The first important books of a 
distinctively botanical character were the so-called herbals, running from 
those of Ruel in 1537 and Fuchs in 1542 to those of Ray and Morison in 
1688 and 1699, respectively. These ponderous folio volumes, written in 
quaint and not always accurate Latin or in no less quaint English, and 
illustrated with crude but often startlingly realistic woodcuts, served as 
repositories of popular and semi-scientific information on plants during the 
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They were based on the writings 
of the Greek and Roman authors named above, but contained many original 
observations. Many of the plants treated by the herbalists were in common 
cultivation, and in that period the crop plants received the same botanical 
attention as did the feral species. Thus we see that the important early 
contributions to botanical science were in the field of what, in recent years, 
unfortunately has been called applied or agricultural botany. 
