Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/774

752 copies were purchased, but in which the contents of the book were doled out by the teacher from the blackboard to a room full of pupils, while ninety-nine copies of the purchased volume remained unopened in the cellar! The most inveterate obstacle to the method is the pervasiveness of the teacher with her drawing, oral instruction, and other school-room processes. They make impossible that training in self-instruction which it was the prime object of the book to secure.

In the plan of the book, leaves were chosen to begin study with, in order to make the first steps easy and effective. Of all the organs of plants, leaves are the simplest and most varied in structure, and are most readily obtained throughout the longest period of the year. With these we are able to begin early the work of self-education, which may be continued along a course of inquiry and discovery that increases in difficulty as by exercise the mind increases in ability. Mrs. Jacobi objects to this. She says, "For the purposes of the beginner the leaf is the least useful, the flower the most." She thinks it better "to seize at once the most striking aspect of the subject, and make the most vivid impression upon the imagination"—adding that "the earliest classifications were based upon the corolla, and a person may often best approach a science through the series of ideas that attended its genesis." Is it the flower or is it only the corolla that Mrs. Jacobi thinks most useful? If the latter, I can only say that, while the corolla is the simplest element of the flower, it is less simple than the leaf, compared with which its forms are few, and not readily classifiable by beginners. If she means the entire flower, we are met by the fact that all its other parts are complex, and often so small as to require the use of a glass in studying their forms. It frequently happens that much strength of judgment is needed in fixing their boundaries and interpreting the appearances they present. Yet, if we are to begin with the flower, it is this complex portion of the plant that Mrs. Jacobi would offer first for the uncultivated attention of the child. The flower was early used in artificial classification, and it is true that the education of the individual must have a general correspondence with the evolution of the race, but this principle can have only a very partial application in primary education, and in this instance its application violates an important law of mental development. It is a fundamental principle of mental growth that the relatively simple and easy shall come before and lead on to the relatively complex and difficult, and to contravene this law is certainly bad education. Nor can I see how the showiness of flowers can in any degree compensate for this total inversion of mental processes. The sensuous interest in flowers is trivial in comparison with the deeper intellectual interest of the child, when discovering for himself the features of plants, and the resemblances of various parts by which relations and affinities are determined. I have found in a long experience with children that the