Oct. i, 1885.] The Australasian Scientific Magazine. 97 
under the general designation “ botany,” we have a group of studies 
which can only be carried on indoors. Indeed, a man might win renown 
as a botanist in his own special department without ever having seen a 
living plant. The very first step is to begin to pull it to pieces. Its 
different parts have to be sliced up for longitudinal, transverse, and oblique 
sections for the microscope. Its petals and leaves have to be macerated in 
spirit to obtain the colouring matter for spectroscopic examination. Its 
wood and leaves and fruit have to be separately examined by a combustion 
process, to ascertain the amount of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, etc., they 
contain. If its seeds are put to grow, they will perhaps lie on a rotating 
wheel to see if gravitation determines at which end they will sprout, or 
they may be put in some chemically-prepared mould, kept in a glass case 
with a ventilator self-regulating according to temperature, supplied with 
light of some one colour only, and be daily weighed and measured. It is 
only by patient laboratory work that we have gained the knowledge we 
have of plant life, and the solution of one problem opens up others which 
demand for their solution more work of a similar kind. These researches 
are not only of interest in themselves and their bearing on the great 
problem what life is ; they not only have a fascination for the poet who — 
Sees alike in stars and flowers a part 
Of the self-same universal being 
Which is throbbing in his brain and heart ; 
but they attract the practical man whose business is to grow plants and 
crops. By knowing how plants live, he knows better how to cultivate 
them, and his interest in such studies is very definite. 
But, besides the real scientific workers and the practical men who seek 
how far the knowledge gained can be made available for supplying the 
needs of life, there are a host of dilletanti followers in science always ready 
to take an interest in the latest novelties or the most recent way of studying 
some aspect of nature. There is as much following of fashion in this as 
there is in dress. The tulip mania and the collection of costly shells arc- 
matters of history only, but many will remember the aquarium rage. In a 
less prominent degree there are fashions in the way of what is called 
studying botany. These changing fashions do not affect the progress of 
the science, but they do indicate changes in popular taste led into different 
directions. The text-books of the present day are totally different from 
those of twenty years ago. Shapes and arrangements of leaves and flowers 
used to come first, and minute structure after. Now the cell, cell growth, 
and cell contents come first, and the forms of leaves and flowers, and their 
arrangement occupy a subordinate position. This, no doubt, is a properly 
philosophical procedure for those who do not merely fitfully take up the 
study. But the effect on those who do so take it up is to lead them away 
from such direct observations as they could make for themselves in the 
field to second-hand information derived from atlases of plates. Text-books 
and examination papers have more than a direct influence. Their 
indirect influence is wide. As physiological botany has come more and 
more into fashion, attention to form and arrangement has gone out of 
fashion. The young generation who give one hour three days a week to 
“grinding up” botany vote it “out of date.” In the same way White of 
Selbourne, Kirby and Spence, and Sir William Jardine are “out of date.” 
A botanist of the old type “out of date” was gradually coming to be looked 
upon as a feeble man content to take things as he saw them, and incapable 
of the effort of following the more abstruse problems modern science has 
