BOTANICAL BOOKS AND THEIR USE 133 



book of botanical texts, as clearly, attractively, induc- 

 tively, synthetically written as possible. It should not 

 be complicated by laboratory directions or pedagogic 

 matter, all of which belong in a separate work. Indeed, 

 the later text-books show a tendency to separate the 

 text-book proper from the laboratory guides and 

 directions, and to make the former simply an attractive 

 and instructive reading book. Such a separation has 

 always been shown in the German text-books, and is 

 carried out in this country in Barnes's recent " Plant 

 Life," and the logical extreme of this principle has 

 produced the present work. In the use of the text- 

 book there is one golden rule, i.e. never to require 

 reading in it upon any laboratory topic until after that 

 topic has been studied in the laboratory. The labora- 

 tory study not only allows of much more intelligent 

 and appreciative reading upon the topics there taken 

 up, but each topic thus studied forms a point of van- 

 tage from which excursions into the unknown may 

 profitably be made. We all know how much more 

 any account of a country or city means to us after we 

 have been there, even though we have seen but a small 

 part of it ; and it is so with accounts of organisms. 



Of good text-books for use in elementary courses 

 there are several. The latest published in this coun- 

 try is Atkinson's " Elementary Botany," a concisely 

 written, modern, finely illustrated work, from the 

 physiological standpoint, with much attention to mor- 



