75 2 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



copies were purchased, but in which the contents of the book were 

 doled out by the teacher from the blackboard to a room full of pupils, 

 while ninety-nine copies of the purchased volume remained unopened 

 in the cellar ! The most inveterate obstacle to the method is the per- 

 vasiveness of the teacher with her drawing, oral instruction, and other 

 school-room processes. They make impossible that training in self- 

 instruction which it was the prime object of the book to secure. 



In the plan of the book, leaves were chosen to begin study with, in 

 order to make the first steps easy and effective. Of all the organs of 

 plants, leaves are the simplest and most varied in structure, and are 

 most readily obtained throughout the longest period of the year. 

 With these we are able to begin early the work of self -education, 

 which may be continued along a course of inquiry and discovery that 

 increases in difficulty as by exercise the mind increases in ability. Mrs. 

 Jacobi objects to this. She says, " For the purposes of the beginner 

 the leaf is the least useful, the flower the most." She thinks it better 

 " to seize at once the most striking aspect of the subject, and make the 

 most vivid impression upon the imagination " adding that " the ear- 

 liest classifications were based upon the corolla, and a person may often 

 best approach a science through the series of ideas that attended its 

 genesis." Is it the flower or is it only the corolla that Mrs. Jacobi 

 thinks most useful ? If the latter, I can only say that, while the co- 

 rolla is the simplest element of the flower, it is less simple than the 

 leaf, compared with which its forms are few, and not readily classifi- 

 able by beginners. If she means the entire flower, we are met by the 

 fact that all its other parts are complex, and often so small as to re- 

 quire the use of a glass in studying their forms. It frequently hap- 

 pens that much strength of judgment is needed in fixing their bounda- 

 ries and interpreting the appearances they present. Yet, if we are to 

 begin with the flower, it is this complex portion of the plant that Mrs. 

 Jacobi would offer first for the uncultivated attention of the child. 

 The flower was early used in artificial classification, and it is true that 

 the education of the individual must have a general correspondence 

 with the evolution of the race, but this principle can have only a very 

 partial application in primary education, and in this instance its appli- 

 cation violates an important law of mental development. It is a fun- 

 damental principle of mental growth that the relatively simple and 

 easy shall come before and lead on to the relatively complex and diffi- 

 cult, and to contravene this law is certainly bad education. Nor can 

 I see how the showiness of flowers can in any degree compensate for 

 this total inversion of mental processes. The sensuous interest in 

 flowers is trivial in comparison with the deeper intellectual interest of 

 the child, when discovering for himself the features of plants, and the 

 resemblances of various parts by which relations and affinities are de- 

 termined. I have found in a long experience with children that the 



