Reconstruction of Elementary Botanical Teaching. 63 
the classical beauty of clearly worked out ideas, while newer sections 
boast the romantic beauty of the primitive. 
Another obvious point is that what is known and taught as 
Botany in successive ages shifts. In earlier days advance was 
slow and to be a generation behind the times was no great matter. 
Now new sections come fast into the field, start their own journals 
and societies, and materialise at a rate which makes it a considerable 
effort for those nurtured in the earlier phases to follow. The 
collective thought of botanists in council should therefore be given 
to laying the foundations of a general course of practicable length 
which will serve as an introduction to all modern phases of the 
subject. Some material must from time to time be dropped as we 
move forward and the teaching term does not expand. The better 
established and more clearly worked out a section has become, the 
easier it should be to get the essentials formulated so that repeated 
exemplification in detail can be spared. This process has been at 
work already and many things taught 20 years ago have faded out. 
Materia medica has gone'; taxonomy has been greatly reduced in 
bulk and now the down-turning thumbs of recent contributors seem 
to point to comparative morphology as the next section to submit to 
the stigma of being called a classic. 
With regard to the new accessions to our federation, we must 
hold it vitally important that students should, in any general 
introduction to botany, be brought definitely to realise the existence 
of these new sections and their respective points of view. A diffi¬ 
culty arises in that the new, developing sections are by no means 
homologous. While the central attraction and justification of 
genetics is a definite discovery—the Mendelian achievement—the 
claim of ecology is much more a way of looking at plants, the 
focussing of scattered existing knowledge and the accumulation of 
fresh knowledge from new and fruitful points of view. Imparting 
to students a conception of ecology is thus a very different task from 
that involved in dealing with genetics. The best way of doing these 
things must be sought out. 
With the new national patronage of science, which chiefly 
means expectation of commercial or political benefit to the state, 
one aspect of any section of botany that may not be overlooked is 
the possibility it presents of translating knowledge into power. 
If this.presentation of botany and its diversity in unity is a 
1 The use of coloured plates for poisonous plants alone, in the earlier 
editions of the Bonn text-book, may to the phylogenist appear to be the last 
trace of this phase. 
