Elementary Botanical Teaching. 243 
This state of things reacts to the detriment of the teaching of 
these more vital studies themselves. The teaching of physiology in 
particular suffers from its sharp isolation from the general study 
of plants, and tends to become excessively academic—often a some¬ 
what dreary catalogue of the results of inconclusive experiments, and 
in the laboratory a series of exercises in test tube reactions and in 
the use of standard pieces of apparatus. It is inevitable, of course, 
that much advanced work in plant physiology should be specialised 
work in what is now called biochemistry and biophysics, dealing, as 
it were, only incidentally with plants themselves. The elementary 
teaching in plant physiology generally current is not even a good 
introduction to that. What is wanted is something broader, more 
vital and more practical, something which shall atone and the same 
time vitalise the student’s first introduction to the study of plants, 
exhibit its connection with practical life, and serve as an introduction 
to the specialised advanced work. We must put an end to the 
divorce of elementary training in the study of function from the 
general study of plant life, a divorce which will necessarily continue 
while general courses in elementary botany are planned primarily 
on morphological lines. 
It is not denied that morphological botany in the hands of a 
teacher of personality and vigour can be made interesting and a 
real instrument of education. The same is true of almost any 
branch of knowledge. What is maintained is that morphological 
botany ought not to be made the main topic of elementary education 
in botany, because, in its current form at least, it is sterile and leads 
to little but further refinements of itself, and because it has no 
outlets on practical life. Morphological botany does not attract 
the type of mind that wants a deeper insight into the working of 
plant processes or into the part which plants play or can be made 
to play in the economy of the world, and it does give an unfortunate 
bias to the type of mind whose activities can be turned with equal 
success to the tracing out of an obscure phylogeny or to the solution 
of a problem in ecology or biochemistry. 
Various efforts which have been made to separate plant 
physiology from morphology bear upon the point under discussion* 
It is noteworthy that these efforts have never come from morpholo¬ 
gists but always from physiologists. More than 20 years ago 
certain animal physiologists, struck by the close bearing of some of 
the recent work on carbohydrate metabolism in plants upon similar 
problems in animals, desired to combine plant physiology and 
