INTRODUCTION 7 



tion here. There are some teachers who believe that 

 the first duty of the Sciences to-day is to supply the 

 conspicuous lack of training in observation and induc- 

 tive reasoning in the general educational system, and 

 that those Sciences and those special parts of them best 

 fitted for this purpose should be used, while other parts 

 are more or less negligible. In other words, they be- 

 lieve that, at least for the present, the Sciences should 

 be dependent organs of the general educational sys- 

 tem, not independent members of it. There are books 

 written with this idea more or less prominent. If the 

 Sciences could yield little beyond mind-training, or if 

 mind-training were the only aim of Education, this posi- 

 tion would be sound. But the Sciences to-day are com- 

 ing to mean much more in Education than the mere 

 stopping of a gap in the general system, more than 

 any certain kind of training, even more than a kind of 

 knowledge made desirable by the activities of the times; 

 they are coming to mean nothing less than a full and 

 perfect equality with any and all other subjects what- 

 soever as elements in culture. This conception of the 

 place of Botany in Education demands much more than 

 the use of such parts of it as are particularly good 

 for inductive training; it demands its treatment as an 

 entity, complete and well-rounded, which implies, again, 

 an objective Optimum as the ideal. I believe such an 

 objective Optimum exists, though much experiment and 

 discussion are needful before it will be found. Never- 



