56 THE TEACHING BOTANIST 



weak and washy nature, and in the next place both 

 teachers and students use it as a cloak for hazy ideas 

 and a lazy release from difficult problems. It has been 

 my observation that those teachers who talk most of 

 the wonderful works of nature, and of loving it for 

 the Creator's sake, and who put verses from the leading 

 poets upon the laboratory blackboards, are the weakest 

 in the scientific quality of their teaching. A great 

 deal of nature study in the schools is also blighted by 

 this weak sentimentalism. 1 The argument that poetry 

 should be used in the laboratory to stimulate the imagi- 

 nation, since the imagination is of great scientific use, 

 is utterly fallacious, for the kind of imagination used in 

 science is visualization and generalization, which are 

 injured more than they are helped by the lighter plays 

 of fancy, the metaphors, and the impressionism of real 

 poetry. Mathematics is a much better training for the 

 scientific imagination than is poetry. Similar objections 

 apply to religious ideas, which in their use by the aver- 

 age teacher are liable to be misinterpreted, and of more 

 ultimate injury than good. When I say that poetry and 

 religion should be kept out of laboratories, I by no means 

 say they are to be kept out of education ; on the con- 

 trary, I think they should be carefully inculcated, but, 

 like the sciences, they should be studied from their own 



1 A needed warning on this subject is given in " Sentimentality in 

 Science Teaching," by E. Thorndike, in the Educational Revieiv fur 

 January, 1899. 



