Reconstruction of Elementary Botanical Teaching. 50 
problem in mind and realising the continued growth of our subject in 
deptli and in extent, it lias seemed to me worth while to run lightly 
through the phases of botany that have successively come to birth 
and dominance in the past; and to pursue the same idea on beyond 
the present. No great pains have been taken to define phases 
critically; the phases have just been indicated, and any guidance 
that emerges comes from this general presentation of our science. 
The problems, phases and sections of botany are not really 
inherent in vegetation though they are often projected on to it: 
they are phases of outlook of the human mind with its changing 
vistas and varying needs. Let us then take man’s outlook on 
plants from the beginning, indicating some nine successive phases 
of scientific or sub-scientific enquiry. 
I. The Phase of Economic Plant Exploitation. Prom the 
prehistoric beginnings of our race there must have been times of 
earnest research and experimentation, involving indeed life and 
death. What countless negative results must have gone to the 
discovery of the edible in all climates and what delicate experiment¬ 
ation has led to the conclusion that capers should be eaten in bud, 
and medlars, alone of all fruit, rotten. A still more surprising 
achievement is the early discovery of nearly all condiments and 
spices ; and the uses and abuses of such drugs as opium, quinine or 
the “ hellish oorali.” Who started experimental physiology by 
using animal ordure for vegetable nurture or discovered the 
value of leguminous crops for improvement of the soil and its 
subsequent returns ? 
II. The Phase of the Herbals. In early historic times the 
science of botany centres round the Hortus Sanitatis and the 
medicinal uses of plants. Here some of the names of teachers and 
text-books survive, but the methods are more like those of the lower 
journalism than of science. Slowly however, by selection, an 
accepted Materia Medica clarified itself from the jumble of alleged 
virtues of plants. 
III. The Phase of Taxonomy. Gradually some scientific spirit 
of knowledge for its own sake pervaded man’s contemplation of 
botany, and existing types were grouped and sifted and regrouped 
by men whose life-long devotion to “plants” gave them great 
unformulated insight into affinities. Systematic botany was then the 
chief science of botany, with its subsidiary descriptive work on the 
formsof flowers, fruits and the vegetative parts of plants. Indefati¬ 
gable collectors ransacked the globe for new species as an end in 
itself. 
