The Teaching Botanist. 273 



of our subject and to the contagiousness of our own enthu- 

 siasm . Fortunately enthusiasm is tolerably contagious among 

 voung people; but as to the interest of our subject — how success- 

 fullv some of us conceal it from the world! The means of con- 

 cealment are various. Some of these are discussed, with great 

 good humor, in this book by Ganong, a teaching botanist, a man 

 possessed by a very contagious form of enthusiasm, a man through 

 whom the many-sided interestingness of our subject shines un- 

 dimmed. So much for reflections about college teaching. 



The teacher of botany in the schools will, I think, feel fewer 

 pricks and prods of conscience on reading this book than his 

 supposedly more fortunate colleague in a college. Instead, he 

 will be cheered and stimmlated by it, he will catch still inore of 

 the enthusiasm which made Ganong write it, and he will learn of 

 new sources of material and of new means of help for his work. 



Following an introduction in which the futility (or worse) of 

 courses in "nature study" in the lower schools is admitted but 

 the sanguine view is expressed that this condition is temporary, 

 is a series of "chapters on subjects im.portant in botanical 

 education." The first, an essay on the place of the sciences in 

 education and of botany among the sciences, shows that the 

 interest of the child and young person in everything about him 

 naturally gives our subject a place in the curriculum of the schools 

 as well as of the colleges. A fruitful comparison of the matter 

 and methods of the natural sciences leads to the conclusion that 

 the descriptive science of physical geography, the experimental 

 sciences of physics and chemistry, and the observational sciences 

 of zoology and botany, offer varieties of training, as well as of 

 information, from which the schools which can not offer all 

 should select by groups rather than by subjects. The argument 

 for a full year of zoology or botany, in preference to a half-year 

 of each, is well stated; the method of the two being substantially 

 the same, the possession of a reasonable amount of information 

 in one subject is more desirable than glimpses of the content of 

 both. 



In the chapter on "what botany is of most educational 

 worth?" a familiar question is once more discussed. A teacher's 

 antecedents and associations so affect his conclusions that his 

 answer to this question must be individual rather than general. 



