Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/373

Rh leaves, stems, flowers, etc., to the perception of contrasts and resemblances among multitudes of plants, by which they are separated into genera, tribes, orders, classes, series, and various intermediate groups. But here, as everywhere, the simple leads to the complex. The limits of these groups are determined by the presence or absence of features that have been made familiar in the course of earlier study.

By the title of her article Mrs. Jacobi gives prominence to the question of precedence between the leaf and the flower with reference to the plan of my little text-book. Obviously a school-book can only imperfectly conform to the various grades of capacity it addresses. If its aim is to reach the lowest grade that can begin the work of systematic and accurate observation; and if, as the result of experience in the present case, it has been found that there is a stage of child-life when the attention may be successfully given to the study of leaf characters, and can not be so held to the study of the flower, it would seem reasonable that the leaf should come first in the order of study. But one might not need to follow the same order with a child ten years old as with a child of six, because the former has greater capacity, and can do what the latter can not. An average child of ten years might perhaps begin observation anywhere, so far as his ability is concerned, while with an average child of five or six this could not be done. As stated in my previous article, it was necessary to begin somewhere, and the book is therefore apparently rigid in method; but I have repeatedly recommended in it that teachers exercise judgment, and skip about and choose what is most timely and appropriate to the circumstances and varying capacity of their pupils. Of course, for those teachers who think it a duty in all cases to begin at the beginning and go straight to the end, there is no help.

If, as in the present case, the dominant idea be that of self-education, if the pupil is to do his own thinking and discovering with the least possible guidance, it will be abundantly found that a young child will do this pleasurably and profitably with leaves before he can do it with flowers; for, in the case of the leaf, the mind passes more gradually from the looseness of common observation and language to the carefulness and accuracy required in the initiation of scientific study. The parts to be at first noted are more differentiated and fewer, and the number of new precise terms to mark them is smaller, and these may hence be firmly associated with the objects before fresh ones are brought forward. And, even if the method of study be purely instructional, if we point out the characters of the object to the child, and explain all about it, while he passively looks on and remembers what he may, we shall still find that the similarity and number of the different parts of the flower, and the duster of new terms that at once crowd upon the attention, confuse and hinder, if they do not positively repel, these youngest beginners.