PHYSIOLOGICAL TEACHING IN BOTANY 403 
of his lieutenants, Professor Thiselton-Dyer, afterwards 
Assistant and successor to Hooker at Kew, himself a student 
of the physiological botany which had made such strides in 
German}^ as well as * knowing plants ' after the fashion of 
the older botanists. 
Hooker's own excursions into botanical physiology enabled 
him to realise the vast importance of this, as an educational 
influence, as technical training, and as a guide to the true 
relations of plants as determined by descent and kinship. 
But to his mind, with its encyclopaedic knowledge of specimens, 
there was one drawback to this insistence on the study of 
structure and function. ' You young men,' he once exclaimed 
to Professor Bower, * do not know your plants.' ^ 
His appreciation of the change which ten years had brought 
about is well shown by his advice to a botanist, then working 
abroad, who had been trained in the old school, not to stand 
for a botanical chair then vacant in England (1884) : 
My impression is, that it would not suit you, without 
indeed you have kept up a knowledge and practice of 
Physiology, minute anatomy, and chemico-phytology, and 
indeed physico-phytology, which now form the staple of the 
Botanical teaching, and above all of Botanical examinations 
in this country. Botany is no longer a knowledge of plants, 
but how parts of plants ' come about ' and what they do ! 
you begin with yeast, moulds, &c., and the higher you go the 
less you know of the whole plants and the more of their 
* inwards.' There is no question of the high scientific value 
and interest of all this, but the outcome of years of it may 
leave a man in utter ignorance of any plant bigger than the 
Torula and Mucor he began with. Botany of this sort is 
the study of the laws of hfe, the highest of any : but to pursue 
it requires a special education ; and to teach it, a special 
practice ; and I do not know if you have had either. I have 
not. It is most necessary for the modern physician and 
surgeon ; it is the gate through which he enters the study of 
^ Apropos of the knowledge of plants and their uses possessed by the old 
field botanists, Mr. Elwes teUs a story of how he and Hooker and Berkeley the 
mycologist were lunching together, when some new pickles from the West Indies 
were placed on the table. Berkeley alone, with his knowledge of Materia 
Medica, was able to identify the ingredients. 
