July, 1921] BALL — ^ RELATION OF BOTANY TO HUMAN WELFARE 333 
Another opportunity of systematic botany in relation to crop plants 
lies in the finding and introduction of new material. Large portions of the 
earth still are not well known botanically. The plants of vastly larger 
areas have not been critically studied with reference to their usefulness in 
other lands. Some will be of direct and immediate service as food materials. 
Others will provide hardy or disease-resistant stocks for grafting purposes, 
while still a third series will possess characters valuable when transmitted 
through hybridization. 
The Problem and the Challenge 
To place varietal experimentation on a firm basis of accurately de- 
scribed and easily recognized material; to insure the identity of new and 
valuable strains; to prevent the faker from profiteering at the expense 
of crop producers; and to provide new plant materials from the four corners 
of the earth, is the greatly needed contribution of systematic botany to 
crop-plant production and so to human welfare. 
The work previously done on the classification of varieties of crop 
plants and the introduction of new material has been the separate product 
of two different groups of workers, botanists and agronomists. You have 
heard the saying that no botanist will look at a cultivated plant, and no 
agronomist at a wild one. Granting the exaggeration, the saying is still 
too true. 
A generation of botanists must be trained to appreciate the funda- 
mental importance of full taxonomic knowledge of crop plants. They must 
recognize that characters sufficient to separate species of wild plants serve 
only to separate closely related field and garden varieties of domesticated 
plants. In dealing with the latter, they must be willing to forget Latin 
nomenclature, if need be, as a Latin terminology must be carried to the 
fifth, sixth, and seventh place in such crops as wheat or corn if one builds 
on the taxonomic foundations already laid. Likewise, a generation of 
agronomists must be produced which has had good foundation training in 
systematic botany, derived in large part from a study of crop plants. 
I put the challenge squarely up to the botanical departments of our 
universities and our land-grant colleges alike to work together to produce 
such a generation of botanists. Equally squarely are the departments of 
agronomy in the land-grant colleges challenged to cooperate with the botani- 
cal departments in producing such agronomists. This challenge is to the 
institutions involved. 
A similar challenge clearly lies before the present and future personnels 
engaged in the investigation of plants from both the agronomic and the 
botanic points of view. The obligation is upon them to cooperate, pooling 
their valuable resources of accumulated experience and information and 
expensive equipment in a common cause. Only by such cooperation can 
satisfactory progress be made in the attack on these problems so vital to the 
welfare of humanity. 
