Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/356

344 highest importance; they should be not only negatively good, that is, innocent, but, when possible, really powerful, that is, brought from the depths of things, and able to sustain all the future life of the mind possessing them. And, since direct perception of facts must precede reasoning upon the inferences which may be drawn from them, it is not only legitimate but important to impress the imagination with typical and fundamental facts, long before these can be reasoned upon, or their laws really understood. This is my lengthy reason for the simple experiment of studying the growth of beans on a saucer of cotton-wool—experiment designed not to teach physiology, but to make an early revelation of life.

In this connection, however, is worth noting a special reason for preferring the flower to the leaf for early study. It is agreed that the functions of living organisms are too difficult for such study; nevertheless, it is desirable to indicate functions when possible, because the fact of function is one eminently characteristic of living things. Now, the function of the leaf is respiration, which can not possibly be made intelligible to the child. It involves chemical relations, which are the latest appreciable, and can not be exhibited except by means of experiments, for which the young child is quite unprepared. The absence of the visible phenomena of animal respiration, moreover, that is of the exhalation of the breath and movements of the thorax, render an attempt to identify the function in plants and animals confusing and apparently contradictory.

On the other hand, the function of the flower—reproduction—can be rendered perfectly intelligible to the child, when he is told that the pollen feeds the ovules, which then visibly grow into seeds, while the ovary ripens to fruit. This statement seems to the child in accordance with his own most urgent personal necessities, and in the common facts of feeding and growth he finds himself linked with other organisms in Nature. It is quite congenial to the normal fetichism of a young child's mind to regard plants as animals; and legends of dryads are as natural to him as to the infancy of the human race.

But the assimilation of animals to plants through the molecular processes of nutrition common to both (though perhaps unconsciously foreshadowed in the story of Narcissus) was not for mankind distinctly formulated until the time of Bichat; and, for the individual intelligence, its comprehension must be deferred until nearly to adolescence.

3. I must plead guilty to an inaccuracy when, quoting from memory, I said that Miss Youmans recommended her pupils to draw the leaves that they studied. But I fell into the error all the more readily, because such a direction entirely commended itself to my own judgment. Nor can I agree at all with the reasons which Miss Youmans now advances in opposition to this method. If the aim at the time be not to learn botany, but "to cultivate the observing powers