Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/326

312 has not had a larger number of followers with us. Possibly the attractions of physics and chemistry have drawn away some who might have done good work in physiology. I fear that in this department, as in some others, there is a tendency to delay beginning until a first-class equipment has been provided, unmindful of the fact that good work has been done by some who had few costly instruments. Evidently, in the future, physiology is to play a more and more important part in botany, and, as the subject is one which has attractions for the public, they could probably be induced to provide the necessary instruments. It is to be hoped, however, that, in asking for a proper outfit, liberally disposed persons will be given to understand that it is to be used for work and not for ordinary class instruction. Certainly, if the colleges are to keep pace with the times, they must pay more attention to physiology than they now do. It is too much to expect that many of them should be able to support laboratories for physiological research, but we ought to have at least half a dozen such laboratories in the country. We shall probably have to do as they do abroad, where some universities pay particular attention to physiology, while others devote their main strength to other departments of botany.

If we should look to college professors and a few experts for what we still have to be done in systematic botany, and to those connected with the more important laboratories for physiological work of the higher grade, histology and the study of life-histories are subjects of vast extent, and, in most of their phases, can be studied successfully by private individuals as well as by professionals. Especially in the matter of life-histories, persons living in the country, or on the sea-shore, are often more favorably situated than those obliged to reside at the large colleges for the greater part of the year. Since for some years to come the opportunities for research on the part of college instructors must be limited by the excessive and unreasonable amount of ordinary class instruction imposed on them, we must look to non-professionals, to a large extent, to accomplish the work of research necessary to raise us to the level of foreign investigators in the departments just named. The proper direction and utilization of the work of amateurs is of especial importance in this country. The amateur abounds more with us than in any other country with the exception of England. "We have an immense variety, from the gay and gallant young man who is going to do something for science, but who now can barely pay his club expenses in winter and run a steam-yacht in summer, down to the impecunious ignoramus who informs you that he is going to write a book, to include all the fungi of this continent, and coolly asks you to give or lend him all your books and specimens, and tell him how to begin. We have the male bore, who kills our time by forcing us to help him kill his; and a copious supply of mild-eyed, sweet-tongued women, whom we can not scold, because they are conscientious, and