Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/325

Rh and could be done well by careful, conscientious workers, without a long experience and without extensive libraries. As far as equipment is concerned, there are, of course, subjects in physiology which require the elaborate apparatus found only in large botanical establishments, but there are others which do not. The botanist who declares that he can not do physiological work because he has not a large amount of apparatus, would do well to recall the case of a Mr. Charles Darwin, who published something on the power of movement in plants.

If the formal publication of descriptions of new species had better be left to a few experts, the collection of material must be accomplished mainly by those who are not connected with colleges, and who are not in a position to profit by large libraries and herbaria, and we have to consider one very perplexing question, viz., How can collectors receive a suitable recognition of their work? The sneering remark, "He is only a collector," is in many cases grossly unjust. In a large part of our country, the work must for some time to come consist in the discovery of the plants not before known, or not well known, and in such regions the work of the collector is just what is wanted. The man who with a keen eye goes into the field and collects, making discriminating notes on the habits and relationships of plants, is doing a very valuable service for science, and is as truly a botanist, in the best sense of the word, as he who, differently situated, writes descriptive monographs or pursues histological or physiological work. The temptation is for a person who, from his surroundings, ought to be a collector, to suppose that he should go further and attempt to describe the species he has found—a task which, as I have already said, can not well be performed away from large libraries and collections. For one, I honor those active and intelligent men and women who, isolated from the botanical centers, bring together the material of which, in the future, books and monographs are to be made. It is not enough to call them merely collectors. They are botanists in full standing.

If I have said that descriptive botany can be studied best by persons attached to the colleges and the comparatively few experts who have access to large collections and libraries, I by no means think that botanical research in colleges should be limited to this field. The one department in which we are already entitled to hold up our heads and say, "We are as good as anybody," is systematic phænogamic botany. In every other department we are behind hand, and must hurry if we would catch up with our more advanced transatlantic brothers. If I have spent some time in defending the claims of systematic botany, it was because the rising generation have developed an unwarranted contempt for such work. The claims of vegetable physiology on our young men are very great; and when we consider that, as a nation, we are noted for our inventive powers and fondness for studies having a practical bearing, it seems a little strange that vegetable physiology