Reconstruction of Elementary Botanical Teaching .253 
idea when he said “ Cultivate the laboratory a little less, and our 
gardens rather more” (Science and the Nation, p. 128). Personally 
I should have preferred “Cultivate the laboratory a little more and 
the garden a lot more.” These references will make it clear that 
the idea of botany as the science of the Living Plant is one that 
has borne itself in on the minds of botanists in different parts of 
the world. 
It seems to me then that among other things that are wanted 
to revivify botany, to bring it into the position it ought to occupy, 
is to think of it and teach it as the science of the Living Plant. 
In its earlier stages a systematic study of external form, botany 
developed during the latter half of the nineteenth century into a 
systematic study of internal structures having for its ultimate aim 
the construction of the genealogical tree of the plant kingdom. 
Along with this morphological study, but occupying in this country 
a decidedly subsidiary position, proceeded the investigation of the 
mechanism of the plant. This aspect of botany, plant physiology, 
has tended to become more and more a biochemical and 
biophysical study of isolated plant organs and isolated plant 
processes. This biochemical physiology is almost as far removed 
in its way from the Science of the Living Plant as morphology 
subordinated to phylogeny. Neither has more than a passing 
interest in the living organism as such. 
It is clear that if the present tendencies are persisted in they 
must inevitably lead to the divorce of morphological from 
physiological botany. This I feel would be disastrous. I do 
most emphatically belong to that school of thought which holds 
that the splitting up of the science into separate water-tight 
compartments would be bad for all branches of the subject. The 
evils attendant on the splitting up of the subject have been dealt 
with in the original memorandum. I agree entirely with the 
remarks on the matter made therein, and 1 need not deal further 
with this question. 
But if botany is treated with the Living Plant as its central 
theme it will embrace morphology and physiology, as well as those 
more recent and from an economic view, most important develop¬ 
ments, such as genetics and plant breeding, plant pathology, ecology, 
which would not be included either in morphology or physiology 
in the commonly accepted narrow sense of these terms. These 
younger studies are most decidedly and essentially aspects of the 
Science of the Living Plant, and when one considers how ill many 
