44 
Reviews and Notes on Literature. 
Introduction to Botany. V.M. Spalding, Professor of Botany 
in the University of Michigan. (Small 8vo. pp. 246, Boston 
and New York, D. C. Heath & Co., 1893). 
Teachers of botany, both in colleges and preparatory schools, — 
have for a long time felt the need of some improvement in _ 
the methods of preparatory work. Botany, as it is at present — 
taught in the great majority of preparatory schools, is too much 
of a cut-and-dried subject; and the student, when he has com- 
pleted the regulation twenty weeks’ course, feels that he has 
completed the subject as well, and enters college with the idea 
that the study of botany means learning the shapes of leaves and 
pressing plants. He has hardly had a glimpse at the structure, 
the physiology, or the relationship of the plant whose Latin name 
he has tried in vain to memorize; and as for plants that do not 
bear flowers he may not know of their existence, below the ferns. 
The University of Michigan has recently made botany one of 
the requisites of preparation for the courses in the Literary De- 
partment. But the inevitable trouble of poor preparation arose, 
and to meet this need Prof. Spalding has issued a text-book, 
which covers the ground that, in his opinion, should be gone over 
in the high school. It is the product of a long experience in teach- 
ing, both in high school and college, and its author has for some 
time had the advantage of putting his methods to a practical test. 
The book is primarily designed to teach the student to study 
nature for himself, and to do this the author makes use of the 
laboratory method. The chapters on organography include most 
of the subjects treated of in Gray’s Lessons, and something of the 
structure of the different organs as well, but they are guides to 
laboratory study rather than descriptions and classifications of 
organs. 
The systematic part is even more of a departure from the 
ordinary methods than the morphological. The student is intro- 
duced to some of the important families by a careful study of one 
or more species; he is then expected to compare this species with 
others of different genera, and so gain a conception of the family. 
