ELEMENTARY BOTANY IN GENERAL EDUCATION. 365 



easily attained means of cultivating in children the powers of 

 observing and comparing direct from Nature, and of leading them 

 to generalize accurately. 



Of course, no advocacy is needed for good preliminary educa- 

 tion in elementary botany in the case of those who are about to 

 continue the pursuit of the subject as an academic study, or for 

 a special purpose, as noted under the headings (2) and (3) ; but 

 a few words may be devoted to pointing out the shocking waste 

 of time and energy on the part of all concerned in the prevailing 

 cases where students come up to a university, or other institu- 

 tion for higher education, insufficiently prepared for progressive 

 study. 



It is still true that boys and young men leave school without 

 so much as a notion of the real meaning and aims of science ; 

 this applies no less to subjects like physics and chemistry, which 

 are professedly much taught in schools now, than to subjects 

 like natural history and botany, which, though avowedly in the 

 curriculum of some good schools, are usually entirely ignored. 



There is considerable discussion about the details, but many 

 practical teachers regard such subjects as unfitted for school, be- 

 cause the boys and girls soon cease to be interested, and get lost 

 in the masses of facts and hard names that beset their path ; this, 

 to my mind, simply shows where the whole system is wrong, and 

 wrong because the tyrant empiricism still rules the prevailing 

 methods of teaching in schools. 



I shall go so far as to say that the only remedy for this state 

 of things is for the teachers to lose that blind worship of facts, as 

 facts, which dominates our school system. I am aware that this 

 lays me open to very serious misconstructions, but I hope to make 

 that all right in the sequel. 



I would say to the teachers, therefore, Do not fall into the mis- 

 take of measuring a boy's progress by the amount of dogmatic 

 information which he imbibes, and splutters forth upon his ex- 

 amination papers, but look to the quality of his understanding of 

 the relations between relatively few and well-chosen facts ; and 

 again, pay less attention to the number of facts which a boy 

 observes and of names he remembers, and more to the way in 

 which he directly makes his observations, and intelligently de- 

 scribes them, even if untechnically. 



This is, I firmly believe, the only cure for the malady under 

 consideration i. e., it is the prevention of it. 



Children in schools are taught most subjects from printed 

 books, and it is not my province to criticise the necessity of this 

 as regards those subjects ; but let a competent teacher try the 

 experiment of making the children read directly from Nature, 

 and he will soon see that the new exercises have a powerful 



