64  Next  Steps  in  Botanical  Science.      { AFe"bma^ ^13"' 
of-doors  laboratory  to  be  diligently  studied  from  border  to  border. 
That  was  the  day  of  the  founding  of  many  small  botanical  gardens, 
and  small  local  herbaria,  some  of  which  having  served  their 
purpose  disappeared  long  since,  while  others  have  grown  into  the 
great  and  flourishing  institutions  of  to-day. 
This  much  as  to  the  botany  of  the  immediate  past;  the  phase 
of  the  science  in  which  the  older  living  botanists  were  trained. 
PRESENT-DAY  BOTANY. 
And  what  of  the  botany  of  to-day?  Let  us  consider  for  a 
little  the  present  condition  of  the  science. 
It  is  Unorganized. — The  personnel  of  botany  has  greatly  in- 
creased with  the  great  increase  in  the  territory  it  now  includes. 
This  personnel,  it  must  be  said,  is  still  quite  heterogeneous.  Some 
of  us  are  largely  self-taught,  so  far  as  the  major  part  of  the  subject 
is  concerned.  We  brought  to  our  work  the  results  of  the  meager 
teaching  of  the  old-time  college  class-rooms,  and  year  by  year  we 
have  enlarged  the  borders  of  our  own  departments  as  we  have 
added  to  our  own  knowledge  of  the  subject  by  means  of  our 
laboratories  and  libraries.  Thus  we  have  built  all  kinds  of  super- 
structures upon  the  foundations  supplied  by  our  teachers.  As  a 
consequence  the  science  is  yet  largely  unorganized  and  lacks  con- 
sistency in  plan  and  purpose.  Here  and  there  a  dominant  man 
has  wrought  out  a  scheme  of  the  science  for  himself,  but  how 
familiar  is  the  fact  to  all  of  us  that  there  is  yet  no  agreement 
even  upon  so  small  a  question  as  to  the  content  of  the  first  year 
of  college  botany,  or  the  mode  of  its  presentation.  There  is  more- 
over a  vagueness  as  to  the  boundaries  of  the  science,  some  botanical 
teachers  wandering  far  across  the  border  into  the  domain  of  some 
contiguous  science,  or  still  more  commonly  into  the  more  or  less 
practical  applications  of  some  portions  of  botany.  This  latter  in- 
discretion is  especially  noticeable  in  the  textbooks  prepared  for  the 
secondary  schools,  in  some  instances  by  botanists  of  good  standing. 
If  this  were  done  by  the  agriculturists,  the  agronomists,  and  horti- 
culturists, the  foresters  and  others  in  similar  lines  of  work  with 
plants,  it  would  not  be  surprising,  but  when  this  is  done  by 
botanists  it  is  significant  of  the  unorganized  condition  of  the  science. 
With  a  fuller  knowledge  of  the  science  there  must  come  a  clearer 
