Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/601

Rh difficult or not, thee training in this direction is so important that it warrants the amount of time and labor spent. As a rule, I fear, classes do not see why I give them pine-wood to study. They dislike the work very much, and feel that they have learned comparatively little. If the only object were to know the structure of pine-wood, I could tell them that in a few moments. What they have learned, without being aware of it at the time, is the way to examine solid, opaque bodies, a category including by far the greater part of biological structures. Once done with the pine-wood, progress is always comparatively rapid, and I can only conclude that the classes are strengthened by the work done on the wood.

I need not occupy your time with any further account of what can best be taught in laboratories to beginners. There is nothing to be said against the plan laid down in the manuals in common use, provided the student is not allowed to follow it mechanically, and look at nothing which is not mentioned in the book. A good instructor is, of course, so well informed about the subject he teaches that he can turn almost any material to account. In my own case, it would be very inconvenient to furnish the same material year after year; but almost anything can be used to illustrate the typical modes of growth and reproduction in the vegetable kingdom, which is what the beginner needs to know.

There are, however, a few points to be considered, which bear on the relations of the instructor to the student in college classes. It should be borne in mind that one is not dealing with school-boys, but with young men who, if they are as ignorant of biology as schoolboys, have, however, learned other things, and whose development, obtained from studies at school, so far from making them better able, has, in the majority of cases, made them only the less fit to take up biological studies. If they have much to learn, they have also something to unlearn. They have been taught to rush at a fact as a bull rushes at a red rag—for the purpose of tossing it away immediately. The position of the instructor is not an easy one. He is under constant restraint, as he must not tell the student, but must, if possible, make the student tell him, the structure of what lies before him. lie is in the position of a boxing-master, who might easily floor his pupil by a single blow, but who must, by the exertion of great prudence and skill, contrive to let the pupil hit him. By a judicious series of questions, suggestions of possibilities or alternatives, the student may be kept in the right track and yet do all the work of advancing toward the truth himself. Under no circumstances should an instructor lot a student, who is a beginner, discover what his own views are about any point to be studied. Although they may be wretched observers of natural objects, it docs not follow that students are not good judges of human nature. Without any instruction they manage to become adepts in that direction. They often hope, by the