36 THE AMERICAN BOTANIST 



of the rest of the faculty, and it is little wonder that after 

 some years of profitless agitation, even the good teacher gives 

 up and goes hack to the conventional course based on dried or 

 pickled specimens or, even worse, teaches botany "out of a 

 book" with the result that botany becomes a talk about plants, 

 instead of a study of the plants themselves. The effect on the 

 child of such a course is depressing to say the least. Normal 

 children love the woods and fields and take delight in finding 

 and naming the flowers, distinguishing the trees, learning h< >\\ 

 they are constructed, why they behave as they do, how to 

 make them grow, and the like, but only an abnormal child 

 can be much interested in trichogynes, antheridia, gameto- 

 phytes, sporidia and the alternation of generations. It makes 

 no difference if college students can be trained to sit up and 

 take such pabulum without making faces ; if the child is to be 

 interested in botany, he must be interested by introducing him 

 to the things in botany that he appreciates, rather than by 

 driving him through a course that he abominates. It has long 

 been known that high school courses in botany do not leave 

 their students interested in the subject, but until they do, 

 the technical botanist need not look for any considerable support 

 from the great public which in the end pays the bills. 



BOOKS AND WRITERS 



If there is anything about fungi that Dr. John W. Harsh- 

 berger did not put into his "Textbook of Mycology and Path- 

 ology" the reviewer has failed to discover it. Nearly 800 pages 

 are devoted to setting forth the subject in a very thorough and 

 painstaking manner. In the first twenty-two chapters the 

 structure and life histories of the various groups are discussed. 

 As the author regards them, there are more than 100 families 

 of fungi and each of these with its important species is included. 

 This part, alone, would make a book of fair size. The next 



