Elementary Botanical Teaching. 245 
the specialised work. It is no doubt true that every problem in 
plant physiology is ultimately a problem in chemistry or physics, 
bnt it is equally true that the biochemist and biophysicist can only 
acquire the perspective in which his problems may be properly 
chosen and posed if he has had a broad general training in element¬ 
ary botany as well as in chemistry and physics. Though such a 
training is supposed to be available in all Universities, in most cases 
this is not the fact because the elementary teaching is dominated 
by morphology. 
The evil effects of the formal divorce of physiology from 
morphology are strikingly illustrated in the sister science of zoology. 
As a result of the independent development of animal physiology 
in relation to medicine, zoology has largely become synonymous with 
comparative anatomy, and has sunk into a condition of sterility in 
which it no longer attracts the student. Attempts to revivify zoology 
by laying stress on the field study of animals, on economic entom¬ 
ology or on genetics—though these studies have had brilliant results 
in their special fields—have not been successful in lifting the subject 
as a whole from the ruts into which it had fallen, precisely because 
such attempts do not envisage the study of animals as a living whole, 
and this cannot be done if animal physiology as the essential basis 
of treatment has to be left out of the account. Botany is threatened 
with a like fate if botanists do not quickly set their house in order. 
It has not yet reached the stage of formal segregation, but it has 
become a concatenation of specialised subjects which have lost 
organic connexion, and the formal separation will inevitably follow 
unless the subject can be given an organic unity by insistence on 
vital elements. 
The case of those who become pure morphologists need not 
detain us long. There will always be some minds which find their 
satisfaction in tracing out formal relationships, though it is significant 
that more and more botanists who have been brought up in that 
tradition are abandoning it for other lines of work. Certainly those 
who eventually devote themselves to pure morphology cannot but 
benefit by acquiring at the outset of their careers a deeper insight 
into the plant as a living organism. Indeed it is only from such a 
deeper insight that any escape of morphology from the mere phylo- 
geny tracing, which has become too prevalent, can be expected. 
It is not necessary, and it would be grossly unfair, to belittle 
the actual achievements'of those leaders of research who have devoted 
themselves with brilliant results to the investigation of phylogenetic 
