Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/597

Rh come from distant colleges and technical schools. The course is strictly an elementary one, and no previous knowledge of botany or zoology is required. As a fact, a considerable number of the class have studied botany before entering college, and, as others have not, I am able to compare the results of different methods of study in the fitting-schools.

After a few directions concerning the use of the compound microscopes placed before them, some simple material is given them to examine. Considering the large number of good books which insist upon proper training of the observing powers, and knowing how extensively they arc read by teachers, I might hope that, at least, a good share of my class would know how to set to work. But what is the case? The first question asked by about three fourths of any class is sure to be, "What do you wish me to observe?" What a question! Is this the result of several years' training, that a young man eighteen years of age, or older, must be told just what to observe when a preparation is put before him? Has it come to this, that, while a boy eight or ten years old will examine with interest objects placed before him, a college student will not examine a preparation until he has been told exactly what he is to see in it? When I reply, "I wish you to examine whatever there is to be seen in your preparation," there is a look of astonishment, sometimes shading off into dismay. That an instructor should expect students to look at an object before them and make out its structure, or attempt to make out its structure, by themselves, seems to them something quite unheard of, and they evidently feel that there is a certain meanness attaching to one who will not tell them just what they must see. It has never entered their beads that, while an instructor may be able to tell them what he himself sees in the object to be studied, he can not tell them what they will see in it, and that it is only after they have studied the object for themselves and attempted to form an idea of its structure that he can explain what is obscure or correct what is erroneous. Evidently the greater part of the students regard the objects placed before them as so many diagrams, and the instructor is to serve the same purpose as the "explanation of figure so-and-so" in a text-book.

The question naturally arises, where were those who ask, "What do you wish me to observe?" fitted for college? Do they all come from the classical schools, where the only natural history studied is a three weeks' cram of Gray's "How Plants Grow"? Unfortunately, they do not. Nothing better, perhaps, could have been expected from schools where nearly all the instruction is confined to languages, and where the inquiring spirit and fondness for observation natural to children, are suppressed to a great extent. Some of the students in question have come from schools, or worse still, from colleges, where natural history is taught, and where use is made of some of the excellent books to which I have already referred. It is evident that a good book is