Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/654

636 with us all the year. The prevalent custom of assigning the spring term only to botany is a relic of scientific ignorance which should long since have been discarded. All Nature studies should extend through the year." President, Coulter, of Lake Forest University, writes: "How many who teach botany are laboring under the impression that botany can be taught only while flowers are blooming? Plants are always with us, and are always fit subjects for study; and is not a moss, or a toadstool, or a seaweed as truly a plant as a buttercup? The only difference is that a buttercup is far more difficult to understand than the others, and is not so fit a subject for elementary study. It is ignorance that makes the toadstool seem difficult and the buttercup easy. From my own experience, and from the testimony of others, I know that children make no such distinctions and find no such difficulties, and in this way they follow Nature."

Unless pupils study the lower plants they get no conception of the great scope of the vegetable kingdom and of the development of one group from another. Fortunately, most colleges and universities are abandoning the old, irrational method, and are adopting the more rational one of giving instruction in the lower plants, instead of spending so much time in learning, for example, the different forms of leaves that seem to be able to perform their functions just as well whether they are "elliptico-oblanceolate" or "palmately-plurifoliate." They have been giving instruction in bacteria, the group of plants that is probably of more importance to man than all the rest combined; they have been having their pupils study the rusts, smuts, and mildews that destroy crops, as well as the more beautiful forms that frequent water and are considered offensive by those unacquainted with them. But the secondary schools, not having properly trained teachers, and not being properly equipped with instruments, have in most cases followed the old method. In fact, most teachers of botany suppose the lower forms too difficult for beginners in secondary schools; but in a few the experiment of beginning with these forms has been tried and the practicability of it verified.

Further, unless pupils learn something of the lower forms of plants they always have an erroneous idea of what a plant really is, and how it differs from an animal. I have found, by testing pupils that have studied in the old way, that they always define a plant as something stationary, as composed of roots, stems, and leaves, and as reproducing by seeds—all of which applies to the higher plants only. In short, they have no real knowledge of the science of botany. It is impossible to understand the structure and the reproductive system of the flowering plants unless the