BOTANY AS IT MAT BE TAUGHT. 369 



BOTANY AS IT MAY BE TAUGHT. 



Bt BYEON D. HALSTED, Sc. d., 

 peofessor of botant, state agrictjltueal college, ames, lotva. 



AT the outset, let the reader's mind he free from, any idea that 

 - the writer thinks he has found a new or royal road to bo- 

 tanical teaching, or that the method here to be stated is any 

 panacea for the ills which follow as a natural result from the old 

 stereotyped ideas of education. He presents it because it has 

 borne good fruit, and combines some features which he has not 

 known of having been dovetailed together elsewhere. This last 

 reason may only give a wide exposure to his ignorance of the 

 ways of botanical teachers. And yet the fault, if it is a fault, lies 

 in part at the feet of his collaborators in natural history. The 

 thought has often occurred to me that botanists do not say enough 

 about their class- work. There is, of course, a strong incentive to 

 let the labor with students be of secondary importance, and to 

 bend all the energies toward some special end in systematic ana- 

 tomical or physiological work, and thereby to feel that the space 

 in the journals is only open to things new to science. A person, 

 however, with large classes to carry, which consume the greater 

 part of his time, often wishes that the periodicals contained more 

 hints and suggestions as to the most approved methods of impart- 

 ing knowledge in a branch of natural history which all advanced 

 teachers agree is passing through the diseases and other dangers 

 and trials incident to childhood. At the present time there are 

 nearly as many ways of carrying a class through a course in bot- 

 any as there are active teachers in the field. Some experienced 

 teachers begin the study with the unicellular plants, and pass 

 upward to the more complex structures. Others advocate opening 

 the study with the kinds most easily found by the untrained eyes 

 and best illustrating all the parts of a highly organized plant. 

 Still others are quite indifferent to method, and consider the sub- 

 ject nearest at hand as the best to use. There are teachers who 

 cling closely to some text-book, and measure their success by the 

 same yard-stick used by the mathematician. Others go to the op- 

 posite extreme, discard all texts, and study only the things them- 

 selves. The great end in view in this last method is the teaching 

 of the student to see for himself and to finally become an earnest, 

 thoughtful, conscientious, and independent reader of the great 

 open book of Nature. The writer confesses a strong feeling of 

 preference toward this last view of instruction in botany. He 

 would have his students see and think for themselves, and yet 

 realize that others have gone over the same path and passed far 



beyond them in every branch of the road they are traveling. 

 VOL. XXXIII. — 24 



