2 mrRODUCTORY 



growing at the kitchen window or the maple that shades the 

 kitchen porch, and that the entire process of bread-raising is due 

 to the growth, development and rapid reproduction of a plant 

 quickened into activity by the presence of moisture and a suitable 

 degree of warmth. Surprise may thence degenerate into a shock 

 w'hen persons, even those of the most refined habits, come to learn 

 that in their own persons they support varied and interesting colo- 

 nies of extremely minute plants which find perhaps the most suit- 

 able conditions for their development and multiplication among 

 the papillae of the tongue and about the crowns of the teeth. 



Somehow many people associate life with locomotion and while 

 they think of animals as alive, they look upon plants as dead, and 

 upon botany as the study of the dead rather than of the living. 

 There can be no greater mistake, for plants equally with animals 

 are not only thoroughly alive, but from the greater simplicity of 

 their structure ofter even better facilities for the working out of 

 problems connected with general biology, the science not of ani- 

 mals alone, but of all living things. 



When a compound microscope becomes as much of a house- 

 hold necessity as a clock or a piano ; when children are early 

 taught the nature study of every-day life, and become familiar 

 with the common things in nature around them, these ideas as to 

 what the term plant life includes will not only cease to strike us 

 as mysterious, but our range of available information will be in- 

 finitely extended. There is no reason w'hatever why a compound 

 microscope of low magnifying power should not be just as much 

 a common appurtenance of a well-regulated household as a piano 

 or a music-box. Not as an instrument to be kept under a glass 

 case to show to strangers, not as an elaborate piece of mechanism 

 liable to become disarranged by use, but a simple apparatus suita- 

 ble to be used by intelligent children and an every day source of 

 instruction and enjoyment. 



In our early childhood many of us acquire certain bits of in- 

 formation, too often as the direct result of teaching, that in after 

 life w^e find ourselves forced to unlearn. Some of these are princi- 

 ples that the books conspired to impress upon us. The dogma 

 that the interior of the earth is molten and that the exterior crust is 

 thinner proportionately than an egg-shell was stated to us in the 

 geographies wuth all the gravity of established truth, and yet it is 



