100 YEARS AGO

So far as the details of practical cultivation are concerned, we are not so much in advance of our forefathers. We have infinitely greater advantages, and we have made use of them, but if they had had them they would have done the same. We are able to bring to bear on our art not only the “resources of civilization” to a degree impossible to our predecessors, but we can avail ourselves also of the teachings of science and endeavour to apply them for the benefit of practical gardening. We are mere infants in this matter at present, and we can only dimly perceive the enormous strides that gardening will make when more fully guided and directed by scientific investigations. One object of this conference is to show that cultural excellence by itself will not secure progress, and to forward this progress by discussing the subject of cross-breeding and hybridisation in all their degrees, alike in their practical and in their scientific aspects. To appreciate the importance of cross-breeding and hybridisation we have only to look round our gardens and our exhibition-tents, or to scan the catalogues of our nurserymen.

From Nature 20 July 1899.

50 YEARS AGO

To find a principle common to a science of physics which, according to some thinkers, is nearing completion, and a science of psychology which, according to all, has scarcely begun, is inevitably to put oneself in the company of the dialectical materialists, the kinematical relativists and others, whose universal, fundamental principles of Nature are alike seductive and baseless and are further alike in being all incompatible with one another. If one likes that kind of thing, one can take a choice between the principle that all things generate their contraries with which they then identify themselves, the principle that all experience must be expressible in terms of intuitive apprehension of the passage of time ⃛ and any other principle that one can think of. I know no way of choosing between them; it seems to depend on which sirens voice sounds the sweetest. I can only recommend, in the strongest possible terms, a liberal use of wax and straps.

From Nature 23 July 1949.