BOTANICAL ACHIEVEMENT1 TWENTY-FIVE years ago The Botanical Society of America imposed on me the task of preparing a presidential address. To-day I meet a similar obligation laid on me by the somewhat more democratized society which continues to bear that name.

For my subject then, I took botanical opportunity-moved, you may say, by the hopefulness of youth which looks forward and plans optimistically. To-day I wish to speak of botanical achievement-moved, you may say, by the observed tendency of age to live in the past. Possibly, later, you may not be sure that in choosing complementary subjects I have not wanted to extract much the same hopeful anticipatory lesson from both.

As one looks back over the past, he sometimes finds it difficult to pick out the significance of individual components of the conglomeration that forms the present superstructure of our science, and its foundations are buried in obscurity. Perhaps the most significant observation that he makes is that a person who is minded to add to it has each year to climb to a greater height before his own work can be commenced-unless he turn his attention to repairing the weaknesses and filling the crevices and pointing-up what has been done by others.

Work of this kind really makes the structure stronger, really keeps it from crumbling at some weak point under the weight that has been added above, and gives it an appearance of finish that must be secured at some time and by some one's labor before it can meet with final approval under critical inspection. Undertaking it may bring to light, even, wholly faulty workmanship or the incorporation of materials that have already begun to

1 Address of retiring president of the Botanical Society of America, given at the Botanists' dinner, St. Louis, December 31, 1919.

disintegrate, and in this way may lead to replacements at various points and to reenforcement of the very foundations.

In putting up a building, such work is found to delay completion of the enterprise to a surprising extent after it seems to the casual observer to be about finished. Those who do it usually derive their satisfaction as workmen from knowing that they are accomplishing something necessary but which ought always to have been left as they leave it; or their esthetic sense is gratified in the pleasing finish that they give to what they found strong and serviceable but raw; or they know that they are safeguarding the completed structure against the inroads of time: but they do not see it really grow under their hands.

If we understand science to be systematized and formulated knowledge, we may be pardoned for stopping to wonder whether sometimes we may not fail fully to grasp the meaning conveyed by these words. Knowledge in a particular field may appear to be systematized and formulated in itself while it lacks comparable incorporation into the knowledge of other things. It may appear ideally dissociated from useful application: but perhaps it never is so in reality. Segregation of the arts which apply science in the practical affairs of life, perhaps does not really remove the necessity of considering all of these applications in the classification and formulation of that knowledge which science claims as its peculiar field.

The edict of an emperor, the injunction of a priest, the counsel of father to son, in the faroff days when civilization was establishing itself on the Tigris and the Ganges or in China, fails to come within our definition of science. We call such instruction empirical rules. But in doing so we can not fail to recognize that before Aristotle philosophized on the phenomena of life and Theophrastus formulated what he knew of plants-which we call the beginning of the science of botany, men had acquired knowledge in our special field and had classified it obviously to the extent of rejection of what they could not use and of selection of what they made the basis

of an agricultural practise which may have been crude and inefficient as measured by the standards of to-day, but which was adequate to their needs and appears very refined in comparison with the earlier dependence for food upon the chase either on land or water, or gleanings of roots and fruits from the plain, the mountain-side, or the forest. One hesitates, even, to think of these still more primitive practises as carried on independently of a very large amount of knowledge gathered and sifted and winnowed through many preceding generations as men worked their way toward an empirical precursor of what we now agree to call science.

When Liebig, the chemist, disposed of the humus theory of nutrition of ordinary plants he is considered to have been making a contribution to the science of botany. When Gilbert and Lawes in the field, and Winogradsky in the laboratory, put the completing link into the chain of the circulation of nitrogen as an active element, they are considered to have been making the same kind of contribution to the same science. I am wondering if my late and lamented associate Cyril Hopkins, calling himself an agronomist, has been far from the same field of science in teaching farmers in the great corn region of the world how to maintain for their children and their children's children a soil fertility that the first generation of white settlers imperiled, and if the last service of his life-carrying his message to those who now farm the worn-out lands of the Hellespont -must be excluded from the recognition that we accord to the achievements of science. If in considering its achievements I chance now and then to wander too far from standardized or forming definitions of our particular science, I trust that the lapses may be excused as evidence of unclear vision rather than wilful disregard of established boundaries.

The superstructure of botany, broadly defined, looks much the same to the casual observer as it did twenty-five years ago. It has been made more finished in parts, windows have been put in where there were blank walls, some parts have been pointed up or rebuilt, perhaps the gables have begun to take form

toward its final closing in; but a snapshot today from certain positions looks very like a snapshot taken a quarter-century ago except that what seemed then to be temporary lean-tos are beginning to look as if they belong where we see them or to give unmistakable signs of strengthening as well as amplifying the whole.

Perhaps this is the impression made on the superannuated workmen of a generation ago, and of some of those whose activities have continued from the earlier time up to the present. The idea of many who have come on to the job within the past two decades is very different. Under their own hands they have seen the shaping of the gables and the rising of the wings, and in their eyes these have given to the whole a very different appearance from what it presented when their work began. Indeed, under their guidance, and from viewpoints of their selection, it may scarcely look like the same edifice; and they may even point with pride to a well-finished and symmetrical annex in comparison with ragged parts of the main wall still defaced by temporary scaffolding.

The edifice of our science is less comparable with a modern warehouse like the great supply-base that the army constructed in nine months on the levee at New Orleans, than with a medieval chateau that has been changed from a feudal castle into a modernized home. The first is planned and constructed as a whole, and is consistent throughout. The other has existed through and developed with the centuries until most traces of its original planif there ever was one-have become obliterated.

Perhaps in this may be found explanation of an impatience that is manifested sometimes by botanists who do not like to see old symmetry changed, or by others who do not like to see labor wasted on walls that are no longer serviceable or to see these guarded from dismemberment so that their materials may be used for additions. Both kinds of criticism are likely to continue as long as construction continues. It may prove a misfortune for botany if either ceases, because the end of its usefulness will have come if it ever reach a stage in which it can no longer be changed with the changing times; but it will have become a

ramshackle unserviceable monument if it ever reach a stage in which it has lost the unification of consistency in its details.

The achievements of botany have been like the achievements of nations in many respects, indeed like human achievements in the aggregate. It is impossible to trace its history without seeing some of the factors which have contributed to or retarded its advancement. Men and incentive have been necessary in the first place, opportunity in the second, and intelligent leadership in the third. Of these, perhaps, it may be said that "the first shall be last, and the last first," without too great deviation from the truth.

Men without leadership, even though they have opportunity and incentive, do not usually accomplish great things: and what unled men have achieved has resulted from their ability to plan for and lead themselves. They have been pioneers whose restless spirit has led them to spy out the land beyond the confines of the known. From the reports or echoes of their experiences has come knowledge that the limits of the knowable lay beyond the limits of the known as they found them; and their individual incursions have been followed ultimately by the invasion of numbers of men under the organization of leaders.

These are the true settlers: their leaders are the apostles of progress. Yet there rarely has been a time when an exodus or a hegira has been complete; and when it has, others less happily circumstanced have found in what was abandoned something to allure them from what they already possessed. Even good leadership, too, may have failed in adequate preliminary knowledge or planning, and more than once the new has proved inferior to the old or has been abandoned under wiser or better-informed guidance, or a generation and more of men have wandered in the wilderness before reaching the promised land; and lesser and transient migrations often have preceded or accompanied a large movement.

The founders of our science were pioneers rather than leaders: men with restless minds, no more satisfied with limitation of their field of action when they could see beyond its

arbitrary boundaries than some of us to-day are satisfied with an arbitrary zero-date for the scientific naming of plants when it is evident that scientific nomenclature began in part at a much earlier date.

Without the nature-philosophy of Aristotle. there would have been no starting point for the systematization of Theophrastus. Yet without centuries of knowledge accumulated through human experience there would have been no background for either. They were the men who through systematization and coordination made the known understood, and thus opened knowable paths into what for them was the unknown.

It was a little incursion led, after a thousand and more years of mental vegetation, by a few nature-loving men of the Rhineland across the old boundaries. Though their day was that of revolt against theologically restricted thought, these resurrectors of a buried but not yet dead science were free-thinkers rather than protestants when they turned from canonized books to a real examination of nature. They were few in number and at first isolated in action; their excursions did not lead them far from home, but they were joined early by others, and their spirit found an instant echo in the sunny south. Instead of remaining explorers they became leaders of little bands whose small advances and retreats cleared the way for advance after advance of the usually better organized and at times better led army of searchers after the truth who in due time became known as botanists,

Small wonder if this growing army saw its legitimate opportunity less comprehensively and less clearly than we see it nearly five hundred years after the movement started! Without such pioneers, the science of botany might have remained to this day within the bounds that Theophrastus found to encompass it over two thousand years ago. Without other, later, even more venturesome pioneers, what they saw in it might remain to us as its present content.

Back of their activities was the incentive that underlay these, the unquenchable human thirst for knowledge. Through the following centuries this has operated side by side with

the equally ineradicable human instinct for leaving well enough alone; and men have progressed dominated and restrained by the massive inertia of conservatism, but breaking free every now and then for a trial of the individual inertia of motion, much as a molecule of evaporating water passes off into freedom-ultimately to be lost in space, to enter into a new cycle, or to return to the bondage from which it made its escape, with far-reaching derangement in any case of the stability of what it left behind or joined.

Effort, when really effective, is purposeful. When the microscope provided means of seeing clearly what living beings consist of, it was not Hooke, who first published its revelations, but Malpighi and Grew, who shortly afterward examined the structure of living things with a view to understanding their vital processes, who laid the foundation for a broader science than their predecessors had conceived. They and their followers, in planning and building on the lines that we now recognize from long habit as being those that characterize botany, did not go far from the procedure that has distinguished successful human effort in general, in which a search after the true and the effective has shaped itself usually into a quest for proof or disproof of some theory of what is true or effective.

Without the guiding line of philosophy, the search might or might not have reached its goal. But with it, the result has depended upon adaptation of the means to the endan adaptation which in our own day and in the last quarter-century has grown with surprising rapidity and extension of the experimental questioning of nature to which science turns with confidence for the solution of those problems that really lie within its field. Beyond that field still lies the realm of metaphysical speculation, which Lewes, half a century ago, protested against calling philosophy because in this sense he felt constrained to call the restless motion of philosophic speculation rotary in contrast with the linear (perhaps one would rather say dendritic) progress of science. The lure of the pioneer lies in the prospect of novel as well as great return. A few years ago some botanists were discussing

present-day opportunity in botany, and the opinion was voiced that it lies in the line of large and special equipment opening fields beyond the reach of the ordinary man. This may really be so. Certainly the first men to use the microscope were privileged beyond their fellows: but as we look back on their work they do not shine with a brilliancy corresponding to the greatness of this privilege. Rather, they profited by it to the extent of their knowledge and talent; made much or little progress according to their possession of these personal gifts; and have been surpassed by men who much after their day were impelled and instructed to look deeper and see further with the same instrument.

The optimism which led me twenty-five years ago to see hopeful opportunity for every man inspired by an all-compelling curious interest in nature and natural phenomena leads me still to see hopeful opportunity ahead of every such man-proportioned to his talent and under everyday environment rather than dependent on the special and novel provision which may fall to the lot of a fortunate individual here and there.

Botany, as a science, grew out of the gradually accumulated knowledge of plants acquired through using and cultivating them. The art of applying this knowledge really underlay the science into which it has been organized and formulated, though to-day it rests upon this, which constitutes a firm foundation in agriculture, medicine and the varied fermentation industries. That its scope should broaden, was as inevitable as that the natural horizon should amplify for a man climbing to a hilltop. That the mere selection of suitable subjects for microscopic study should result in closer observation of all that was looked at was equally natural. That Van Helmont's demonstration that plants are not built up out of earth should have preceded a separate analysis of all possible sources of their substance is self-evident. But discovery of the large part that the atmosphere plays in this organic synthesis, of the marvelous organism that a vegetable cell proves to be, and of the part played in heredity by some of the parts of this unit organism of organisms,

is seen to have resulted more from the intelligent ingenious use of means at hand than from restricted privilege.

If one were to lapse into momentary pessimism in an optimistic review, the slip would come from recognition of the instinctive conservatism that inclines most of us to see only a form of some well known plant in a specimen that the inspired discoverer knows and even describes as hitherto unknown; or that leads us to ignore as dirt " or artefacts the seemingly uncharacteristic parts of our preparations-as Löhnis believes that the most eminent bacteriologists have done; or that leads to a wish that experiments on living things were not so apt to turn out differently from the predicted result. We may destroy puzzling intermediates, throw away disappointing preparations, or exclude unsuccessful experiments from our calculations: but we do not explain them in doing this-we merely evade the truth that they mutely offer for our apprehension. It is the exceptional man who, even if he lay them aside for the time, as Haeckel, in his youth, did the "bad" species of his herbarium, can not rest until he understands them.

This is the true pioneer type, not content with what is believed to be the known nor satisfied with little excursions beyond its border, but boldly, in season and out of season, pushing out into the unknown. Such incursions, guided by the compass of correct methods and starting from the direction of acquired knowledge, have been, are and seem likely to continue to be, the epoch-making first moves in scientific progress.

Men who lead in such progress sometimes set off with general approval and good wishes. They follow the bent of their less enterprising fellows. Even rumors of their achievements are received at par and passed on at a premium. Fortunate, then, for science, if the log of their journey come back for verification, for our average human tendency is to believe what we want to believe, and those of us who do not travel to the pole care for little more than to be told that it has been reached by an enterprising explorer when we confidently expected such an explorer to get there.