Reconstruction of Elementary Botanical Teaching. 61 
section of botany has segregated itself in our midst from devotion 
to Nature Study and Vegetation as it actually exists upon the sur¬ 
face of the earth. Ecology widens the botanical horizon 
enormously hy insisting upon our adding what may be called the 
sociological outlook to the various other ways in which plants have 
been regarded. That a new section should thus materialise in 
these later days based merely upon phenomena of vegetation which 
have been before the eyes of botanists from the beginning, illustrates 
the huge content of the science and the human, subjective nature 
of the sections into which it is divided. All this certainly adds to 
the difficulty of devising for students a general but comprehensive 
introduction to botany as a whole. 
VIII. The Biology of the Individual. Further I think one may 
indicate a group of phenomena, associated with the existence 
and development of every plant as a living individual, which is 
perhaps now cohering and in process of segregation to form a 
definite section of our science. These are essentially matters of life, 
but hardly included in physiology in the narrow sense of physiology 
of functions and organs: the outlook is upon the plant as an individual 
life-history, and its associated problems are brought most vividly 
before those who carry on the culture of plants in horto or in agro. 
Enumeration of a few will suffice to indicate the scope of this 
section ; ripeness and viability of seeds ; dormancy of seeds in soil ; 
retardation and forcing of vegetative activity ; the laws of growth- 
rate and of dry-weight increase ; intensive cultivation, vegetative 
growth versus reproductive activity; crop yield and predetermination 
of it. 1 
In the future other phases must arise and acquire a measure 
of autonomy: we all await a constructive philosophy of plant-form— 
a crystallography of the organised plant—which will interpret such 
strange things as the sickle-shaped cells of some green Algae and 
the mimicry forms of Caulerpa as well as the problems of polarity 
and regeneration. 
The specialised study of one group of plants is not to be 
counted as an independent phase from our present point of view. 
1 It is true that many of these matters are already regarded as part of the 
subject of Ecology in its widest sense. Ecology is so comprehensive that it 
can be presented as including the whole of physiology and practically all the 
phenomena of living vegetation, but the history of the growth of the phases of 
Botany shows that Physiology as a human outlook has an independent existence 
and so also the matters collected in this section have their independent origin 
and inspiration in growth and culture of plants, and not in the ecological 
outlook. 
