88 THE AMERICAN BOTANIST 



Place of Experiment in Botany. — When I want to 

 learn all that I possibly can of a new country, I visit it if I can 

 do so, and see all I can of it, but I do not hesitate to use maps 

 and read books pertaining to the country. I may even ask the 

 people who have lived there longer than I to tell me all that 

 they know. In this way I build up my knowledge of the 

 country and it is good and reliable, far more so, perhaps, than 

 if I had relied wholly upon what I could have seen personally. 

 And so it is in Botany. I must surely see as much for myself 

 as possible, but life is quite too short for me to hope to see all 

 that is known with my own eyes. Here and there, at critical 

 and strategic points, I must see for myself and then I can go 

 a long way, when I must again get my reckoning by observa- 

 tion. The mariner does not sail the seas by doing nothing but 

 make mathematical observations. It would be slow sailing in- 

 deed were he to do so. And yet this is what some of the book- 

 makers are planning to have the children do — they are to 

 learn everything about plants by the experimental method. 

 They lose sight of the fact that there is no special saving 

 grace in the labor of making experiments. We make experi- 

 ments on plants in order that we may learn botany. We do 

 not learn botany in order to make experiments on plants. Let 

 every teacher remember that useless experiments involve as 

 real a waste of time as dawdling or idling. I can walk from 

 Lincoln to Denver, but it takes so much time that it will pay 

 me far better to be carried there on a railway train. — Prof. 

 C E. Bessey in Science. 



The "Peg" in Curcubit.s. — The path that leads from 

 solid fundamentals into the mazes of exception and individual 

 peculiarity in botany is one that is easy to mistake for the 

 right one and many good teachers are lost therein. A good 

 illustration of this fact is seen in the importance that some 

 teachers ascribe to the peg in the seedlings of the gourd 

 family. The peg, as most students are aware, is a small pro- 



