The seven ages of a medical scientist. An autobiography

vented him from establishing the 'new science' as a viable tradition in Cambridge" (p. 72). This is, I think, an unjustifiable view of the history of botany. In choosing to discuss the development of whole-plant science, Walters has impoverished his subject the shaping of Cambridge botany so that the title of his book is a misnomer. Walters describes Henslow as a precursor of the "New Botany", a title properly reserved for the qualitatively different subject which paid attention to plant physiQlogy and plant chemical physiology (in the work of Francis Darwin, Sidney Vines, and Joseph Reynolds Green). As J. D. Hooker wrote in 1884, "Botany is no longer a knowledge of plants but . . . what they do! You begin with yeasts, moulds, etc., and the higher you go the less you know of the whole plant and the more of their inwards" [my italics].' Henslow's teaching and papers are of a different sta^mp from those of his contemporary Arthur Henfrey (1819-1859), of whom Von Mohl wrote that he was "the first representative of physiological botany in England".2 Walters is, to be fair, aware of his neglect of the development of cellular approaches to plantlife. In pursuing one set of aims, it is unfair to be chided for not having considered some other. Perhaps, but at least that set of aims should provide one with a historically satisfying account. Taking Harry Marshall Ward, Professor of Botany after Babington, for example, Walters is forced by his approach to emphasize his whole-plant work, which in fact represented only a small fraction of his efforts, which were mainly in mycology and bacteriology. In the 1870s, Cambridge botanists uprooted the whole plant it is debatable whether it ever recovered. One is left with the feeling that, in his deep concern for such studies, Walters has been forced to do some repotting in shallow historical soil.