THE PRESENT POSITION OF BOl'ANY 253 
development and metabolism of the plant form a continuous connected 
history in which process and structure continually act and interact. 
Nevertheless, the ‘ physiological functions ’ of adult structures cer¬ 
tainly have a special position in that the processes of which they 
consist are, like the adult structures themselves, the current terms of 
ontogenetic development, the current stages of full expression of the 
given genotype under the given conditions of life. 
“ The separation of morphology and physiology no doubt ulti¬ 
mately takes origin from the two distinct types of human interest in 
living organisms, characteristic of different types of mind, the one 
attracted by the forms, formal relationships and classification of 
objects , the other by the understanding of process , the knowledge of 
working. The one naturally observes and classifies, the other observes 
and experiments. This kind of separation, clearly enough seen 
among the older naturalists, has been greatly enhanced on the one 
hand by the enthusiastic effort to trace phylogeny consequent on the 
acceptance of the doctrine of descent, on the other by the continuous 
complication of the physical and chemical knowledge and technique 
required by the study of physiological processes. It has had a 
profound effect on the teaching of botany during the past forty 
years. Botanists whose personal research lay in the one field have 
been less and less able to take an intelligent interest in the other, 
even if they could understand the terms in which the results were 
expressed. The student has perforce come to regard and to study the 
two fields as wholly distinct, with very few points of contact, and his 
attention has been directed primarily to morphology largely because 
it is so much easier for the beginner to examine and cut sections of 
plants and draw pictures of them than to study the processes which 
go to the making of them. Too little serious effort has been made to 
overcome the difficulties of teaching students to study process. The 
physiologists themselves have been too much absorbed in their appa¬ 
ratus to consider the bearing of their subject on general botany. In 
recent years the rise of new branches of study, such as cytology, 
genetics, and ecology, has added to the distraction of the student. 
“ The result has been to separate botany into disconnected parts and 
failure to give the student any unified notion of the subject. It is 
unnecessary to say that the growth of knowledge invariably brings in 
its train ever-increasing specialisation in research, but that fact in no 
way absolves the teacher who is responsible for the introduction of 
students to the subject from the duty of displaying it as a whole, and 
this he can only do by making its most vital part, the study of 
process, the kev to his exposition, by representing all structure as the 
result of process, and, in its turn, as limiting and directing process, 
rather than by concentrating the student’s interest on structure and 
the comparison of structure for its own sake. It seems to me most 
misleading to represent morphology (in the sense in which it has 
come to be used) and physiology as if they were equivalent branches 
of the subject between which the attention of students should be 
divided. It is only the most superficial view that can regard them as 
equivalent. Structures are the end results of processes, and to under¬ 
stand them we must study process by observation and experiment. 
