ON THE POPULARIZATION OF BOTANY

Abstract

HOW TO ATTRACT more young students to the study of botany was the announced subject of one session of botanists who met in December of 1924 in Washington, D. C. I attended because I was just then quitting the ranks of professional botanists for freelance writing as a popularizer. But no one in that gathering of intellects there in a classroom of the Central High School (empty of students over the Christmas holidays) proffered any ideas on the subject. They appeared, rather, to be reading into the record (as Congressmen say) miscellaneous matters which they wished to impress on other botanists or merely to get off their chests. Others, looking very wise, said nothing. But they were all, I felt, boring each other exquisitely, and when the gavel fell to signal the end of a futile session, there was an almost undignified rush for the door. As the youngest person in the room, I allowed my betters to precede me. Then I looked back at the high school classroom. Give botany a wide miss, kids, I thought, until botanists can do better by you than they did by each other here today. When I was invited by the AMERICAN JOURNAL OF BOTANY to submit this paper, with the suggestion that it was hoped that some intelligent high school student (among others), coming on the Golden Jubilee number, might be induced by it to turn to botany for a life work, I remembered that long-ago non-meeting of great minds in Washington. It is not my intent or business to tell botany teachers how to run their courses, still less to suggest that they could make them more popular. Obviously teachers know better than I do how that could be done, or whether it should be done. My purpose here is to speak of the popularization of botany outside of classrooms, and to tell a little of my first-hand experiences in popularization, which go back now thirty years during which I have earned most of my living in that way. Sometimes indeed I was not making much of a living, especially at the beginning when I ran a column in the Washington Evening Star and wrote articles for Nature Magazine. At the same time I was finishing and trying to find a publisher for my first book, Cargoes and Harvests, a popularization of economic botany. And I can still recall how much I had had to learn about the skills of popularization and how little I had been prepared for it, even in the correct point of view, by my formal botanical training. Base, common, and popular I must then have seemed to my botanical friends, like a lieutenant broken to the rank of sergeant or corporal. At Hlarvard, in most of the classes I had attended, economic botany had been despised as something tainted with commercialism, and as for popularization, it was considered no part of botany at all but to beiong, rather, to the discipline (if any) of journalism. As for the interest I had always had in linking botany with other things in life-philosophy, for instance, human history, folklore-the breadth of my interests had often been taken as proof of my shallowness, and sometimes roused outspoken criticism. Thus in the big midwestern university where I first began my botanical studies, I was told by a laboratory assistant(now a wellknown professor), The way I size you up, you're one of these smatter-artists we get around here sometimes.