242 
The Reconstruction of 
paucity of reasonably paid research posts, and yet others to the 
limited outlets on practical life which botany at present affords. 
Doubtless all these factors are involved, and many of them are 
certainly largely related as cause and effect. Thus if a great deal 
of the actual work done in the subject, and especially that to which 
the student’s attention is largely directed from the outset, is not of 
a nature or quality to attract and interest the best types of mind 
among possible students, the average quality of student is bound to 
be low. If the ultimate income to be expected in any career to 
which the study of botany leads, except for a few reasonably well 
paid posts, is absurdly low—much too low to satisfy the reasonable 
demands on life of the average vigorous-minded man of normal 
desires, and if the outlets on practical life are few and narrow, 
vigorous-minded men will be few among botanical students. This 
state of things will react on the quality of the teachers, who are 
drawn from among the students of a few years ago, and who will 
also be without the stimulus afforded by first-rate and active- 
minded pupils. The whole set of conditions becomes a vicious 
circle, which has to be broken at some point if there is to be any 
real and general improvement. Where is it practicable to break 
the circle ? The view taken in this memorandum is that one point 
which it is essential to attack and which can be successfully attacked 
is the reform of elementary teaching. 
Botany in this country is still largely dominated by the 
morphological tradition, founded on the attempt to trace the 
phylogenetic relationships of plants, which began as the result of the 
general acceptance of the doctrine of descent. Elementary teaching 
(as well as a very large part of advanced teaching) is mainly 
occupied with the endless facts of structure and with their inter¬ 
pretation from the phylogenetic standpoint. Side by side with this 
there generally goes a discussion of function which is often limited 
by a crude Darwinian teleology. Plant physiology is relegated in 
most cases to a subordinate place and is taught as a separate 
subject. The newer studies of ecology and of genetics play a very 
small part in the curriculum. The result is that the student’s 
introduction to the study of plant life is unbalanced and has a 
definite morphological bias v He inevitably comes to regard the 
most vital parts of the subject—those dealing with the plant as a 
living organism—as specialised studies of subordinate importance. 
The elementary student is not clearly shown the essential basic 
importance of these studies, which should be fundamental, because 
his teaching is mainly in the hands of men who are primarily 
morphologists. 
