The Unification of Pure Botany

Abstract

THE history of the development of the science of botany in Great Britain since the great revolution in biological thought brought about by Darwin is an interesting and instructive study. Botany now represents so vast a field of knowledge and research that it is quite impossible for any single individual to gain an intimate first-hand acquaintance with all its different branches. Many research workers spend their lives in cultivating a small area of one portion of this immense territory. Nowadays many of them have very little interest in or understanding of the work of their fellow “botanists.” The taxonomy of flowering plants and of the various lower groups, the ecology and general natural history of all this multitude of forms, their gross and their minute anatomy, histology, and cytology; the study of variation and heredity; the great and varied field of modern plant physiology, with its interest more and more centred in the chemical and physical characters of protoplasm and its derivatives; the study of the characteristic aggregates of plant life that we call vegetation; the applications of botany to agriculture and to industry-we need only pass these fields of study rapidly before our minds to realise their enormous range, and the want of connexion in practice between the topics with which, a modern botanist may occupy himself.