— ^ ^ 



SCHOOL BOTANY^;s=^f, 



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Successful Teaching. — The measure of the teachers 

 success is the degree in which ideas come, not from him but 

 from his pupils. A brilHant address may produce a tempor- 

 ary emotion of admiration, a dry lecture may produce a per- 

 manent impulse in its hearers. One may compare some who 

 are popularly known as gifted teachers to expert swimmers 

 who stay on the bank and talk inspiringly on analysis of 

 strokes ; the centrifugal teacher takes the pupils into the water 

 with him ; he may even pretend to drown and call for rescue. 

 This was the lesson taught me by the great embryologist 

 Francis Balfour of Cambridge who was singularly noted for 

 doing joint papers with his men. An experiment I have tried 

 with great success in order to cultivate centrifugal power and 

 expression at the same time is to get out of the lecture chair 

 and make my students in turn lecture to me. This is virtually 

 the famous method of teaching law re-discovered by the edu- 

 cational genius of Langdell ; the students do all the lecturing 

 and discoursing, the professor lolls quietly in his chair and 

 makes comment; the stimulus upon ambition and competition 

 is fairly magical ; there is in the class-room the real intellectual 

 struggle for existence which one meets in the world of affairs. 

 I would apply this very Socratic principle to every branch of 

 instruction early and late, and thus obey the "acceleration" 

 law in education which I have spoken of above as bringing 

 into earlier and earlier stages, those powers which are to be 

 actually in service in after life. — Dr. H. F. Osborn in Science. 



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