246 The Reconstruction of 
problems. The British school of morphologists, whose work largely 
derived its inspiration and opportunity from the revival of the study 
of fossil plants some 20 or 30 years ago, has won a distinguished 
reputation throughout the world. It has worthily upheld the 
loftiest traditions of pure science and it has inspired in many 
younger workers a profound interest in their subject and an intense 
devotion to those traditions. The very distinction and success of 
the school has indeed tended to overshadow academic botany in this 
country, and to divert effort and enthusiasm from the channels 
which we cannot but regard as most essential to the healthy life of 
botany as a whole. Nowhere has this effect been more marked 
than in the sphere of elementary teaching. 
But between pure morphology, on the one hand, and physiology 
in its purely chemical and physical aspects, on the other, come a 
number of lines of activity which seem to promise great develop* 
ments in the immediate future and to have numerous outlets on 
practical life. The middle strata, so to speak, of botanical knowledge 
and investigation, consisting of problems and topics which cannot yet 
be subjected to the deepest chemico-physical analysis, but which 
really form, or should form, the very core of the study of plants as 
living organisms, are precisely those which are neglected by teachers 
who are either pure morphologists or academic physiologists—men 
who have an intimate acquaintance with structure or who can use 
plants as the vehicles of chemical and physical experiments, but 
have no practical first-hand knowledge of the life of plants in the 
field or in the garden, men in fact who are remote from reality in 
all that concerns plants as living beings. 
A drastically reconstructed course in elementary botany seems 
to be the essential starting point of an adequate training for these 
lines of work. Elementary teaching should be founded in the first 
place on a thorough recognition of the fact that the fundamental 
structure and activities of plants and the part they play in relation 
to the inorganic world and to animals, are conditioned by their 
chemical and physical nature. This may seem a platitude, but how 
far the average University teacher is from bringing home to his 
students any real recognition of this basic principle may be readily 
learned from the answers to examination questions. Then there 
should be a treatment of the physiological as well as the structural 
life history of the individual plant, passing on to different ecological 
types with their physiological as well as their structural characters, 
and leading to an elementary treatment of competition and the 
