THE AMERICAN BOTANIST 25 



mental metabolism of your own so that you have lent some- 

 thing to it. To be a man of culture you need not be a man of 

 creative power because such men are few, they are bom and 

 not made ; but you must be a man of some degree of centrifugal 

 force, of individuality, of critical opinion, who must make 

 over what is read into conversation and into life. — Dr. H. F. 

 Oshorn in Science. 



The Scientific Bent. — The man who is born to zeal 

 for experiment or observation can not be put down. He is 

 always at it. Somewhere or somehow^ he will come to his 

 own. No man ever adds much to the sum of human know- 

 ledge because the road is made easy for him. Leisure, salary, 

 libraries, apparatus, problems, appreciation — none of these 

 will make an investigator out of a man who is willing to be 

 anything else. There is human nature among scientific men, 

 and human nature is prone to follow the lines of least resist- 

 ance. It takes orginality, enthusiasm, abounding life, to turn 

 any man from what is easily known to that which is knowable 

 only through the sweat of the intellect. — David Star Jordan 

 in Science. 



Research Work and the Teacher. — Our science 

 courses are still very imperfectly adapted to their constituen- 

 cies, and we need a study of the reasons and remedies therefor. 

 We have great need for a discovery of better ways of present- 

 ing and demonstrating important matters, for more effective 

 and simpler experiments, for more illustrative methods and 

 materials. Again, the extreme specialization of modern 

 science and the consequent inaccessibility of most of its new re- 

 sults to general users of knowledge make vastly valuable the 

 preparation and publication of such expositions of important 

 botanical subjects as combine literary elegance, pedagogical 

 force and scientific accuracy; and the teacher who does this 

 work well comes very close to the investigator. The com- 



