SOME RESPONSIBILITIES OF BOTANICAL SCIENCE1

WHEN this meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science was first announced it was the expectation of all of us that our discussions and deliberations here would center primarily about the immediate and practical needs of a time of war. In those days the thought seemed common in this country, that it was the plain duty of scientists to lay their more remote aims aside for the time being and to devote their energies almost entirely to practicalities, the practicalities of those great martial undertakings whose wonderfully successful results have only just now passed into history. But it has become clear that the needs of a modern militant nation are not merely men and money; the ramifications of these needs seem to have led into nearly every cranny of human activity, so that almost every person has found ways by which his special fitness, for some activities rather than for others, might be utilized in this grand mobilization of the nation as a whole. In very many cases it has appeared that the more remote aims of those whose activities are primarily intellectual and spiritual are not to be laid wholly aside at the sounding of the trumpet of war and at the waving of the battle flag. It has emerged that most or all of those activities that may truthfully be called essential for peace and for the general advancement, are also essential in time of war. Details have required alteration, but the war has led, on the whole, rather to an acceleration, to a speeding-up of the majority of productive peace activities, rather than to the laying of such activities aside.

War differs from peace rather in degree than

1 Address of the chairman and vice-president of Section G-Botany, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Baltimore, December,

1918.

in kind. It calls for a mobilization-which is a planned cooperation-of all the valuable and worthy activities of the nation. And just such a mobilization was proceeding with ever-increasing strides in this country, until the news of the present armistice announced the need for still further changes of detail. Let us hope that the spirit of planned activity, aroused from the magic lamp of human nature by the rubbing of a martial hand, may not be sent to rest with the return of peace. The civilized world has found again that the greatest human pleasures and satisfactions may come from the giving of money and goods and heartbeats and even the life-blood of many individuals, all for the furthering of the same worthy cause. It has found that national and world mobilization are the means whereby great works may be rapidly achieved, it has found that cooperation between individuals and between states is the means whereby the pleasures of the accomplishment of such works are to be most quickly attained. In order that we and those who follow us may enjoy these great pleasures of accomplishment, let us strive to keep the spirit of cooperation alive and aggressively active against the false demons of the more primitive and more frequently prevailing forms of selfishness, and let us move forward, with this spirit in our hearts, into the era that is now dawning.

The burden of my words to you this afternoon will be to ask you to pass, for a few minutes, out of the work-a-day world of selfish struggles for "credit" or "priority" in scientific literature, or for salary increase and the like of that, out of the world of minute detail with its microscope lenses and balance pans, and to dwell for a little while on some of the larger possibilities and opportunities that lie before botanical science at this time. And I shall wish to emphasize the idea that, for a goodly number of us, at any rate, these possibilities and opportunities are tasks and responsibilities that really and truly need to be

met.

It is well first to realize that those who devote their lives to science have peculiar responsibilities. The body of human knowledge

has grown apace and constitutes our most cherished possession. It alone can be handed on to the coming generations; other human achievements wear out and disintegrate with time, while knowledge lasts and grows and increases in value as our race matures. Whatever may be your idea of the final good of human life, whether it be to glorify God or wallop the devil, to give ourselves pleasure in the present or in the future, or to give to coming generations a better chance to live as they will wish to live-no matter at what particular angle you may view these academic questions of ultimate results, you will surely agree that the preservation of real knowledge is one of our responsibilities. We and our posterity will have great need for all the knowledge that is available, to-morrow and the day after, and one of our world responsibilities is clearly to see that knowledge once gained shall not be lost.

But this is not all. It is not sufficient for a healthy human being to act merely as a vestal, simply to keep a torch burning that was kindled by others. It is our instinct to increase the body of science as well as to preserve what has been accomplished, and instinct appears to accord with reason here, for if knowledge is valuable it should be increased as rapidly as possible. This is, then, another of our world-responsibilities.

To preserve for the future all that is known of ourselves and of the universe about us, to make this knowledge ever more readily available, and to add to the store as we work it over and hand it on to others, these seem to be the prime responsibilities of human beings, as distinguished from other organisms. Now, if these things are to be done there is no group of society so fitted to do them as is the group of scientists; upon them has fallen the mantle of the vestal and that of the priest. Society, as a whole, relies on scientists for these things and these responsibilities are especially ours.

It has frequently seemed to me that we, as a group, fulfill these requirements with a maximum of friction and waste and with a minimum of efficiency. At least it is not difficult for a dreamer or an idealist to suggest general

ways by which our service to humanity might be greatly enhanced. If improvements might be introduced each individual might find more pleasure than is now possible, in his own work and in that of the group, and it seems just now to be an opportune time to take some thought as to possible ways by which our social function as scientists may become more satisfactory, both to ourselves and to those outside of our group. A kind of idealism has succeeded in winning the war, and he who runs may read that this was a war of science, and that it was through science that it was finally won. Consequently, I may not be too bold if I here pass in review some of the suggestions for an improved science that have come to me in one way or another.

In the first place, ever since my student days it has seemed very strange to me that the devotees of science lay so little stress on the broader and more general aspects of their work and upon the aims that are held in view. Our introductory books plunge the beginner into a maze of concrete detail, without attending to the orientation that every beginner needs. Our teaching of beginners follows our texts, or else our texts follow our teaching. We imply that this general orientation, this appreciation of the relations between our particular small chapter of science and the great body of human knowledge, will care for itself, without conscious attention. We see that our students learn how to weigh a seed or how to stain a chromosome, and we strive to give them a digest of all that is so far known of seeds or chromosomes, but it is only seldom that the very need for such knowledge receives adequate attention. I am not sure whether botanical science is to be criticized more in this respect than other branches, but I am sure that the criticism is justly to be considered by botanists of all sorts.

Obviously the matter has lain largely in a lack of esprit du corps among botanists; we have largely failed to be conscious of our responsibility as a group. We have not taken the trouble to find out what we can agree on, and an outsider feels that we can not agree

on anything at all. As the late Professor Bessey remarked of botanical research, the work of botanical science is carried on by a sort of guerilla warfare, each botanist for himself. To speed up our work in all lines we need more team-play, as it were. We need to have somewhat clearly in mind what, indeed, our activities are all about. If we might attend to these matters of orientation we ought to be able, then, to emphasize certain sorts of work that are to be regarded as the more important, for the present.

The answer to the question as to how guerilla warfare, without esprit du corps and without conscious aims, is to be metamorphosed into a planned and productive campaign, lies, I am almost certain, in the connotation of the word cooperation. As we mobilized ourselves and laid aside our individual differences of opinion or faith, in order to help in the winning of the war, even so ( if we thought it important enough) we might mobilize ourselves for the rational acceleration of the work of botanical and other sciences. One of our greatest responsibilities right now is to orient ourselves as a group and to plan our campaign of work for the immediate future.

The group of botanists is an international group and our mobilization should aim to be international finally, but it were well if the botanists of this country might put their own house in order as a first move toward the setting up of conscious aims and planned campaigns by the world group. In the meantime, botanical scientists of other countries may be doing likewise, and the International Association, or some other organization, might become the means of bringing the national groups into a single whole.

Turning to matters a little more concrete, I suggest that there are two quite different kinds of aims or objects, toward which we may strive. The first of these has to do with our responsibility to preserve botanical knowledge, to make it available for all sorts of application, and to pass it on to the next and later generations. The second kind of aim deals with our responsibility, to add to botan