370 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Ko one but the teacher knows how hard it is to dispossess the 

 minds of some students of the old inherited ideas of learning from 

 books. They take as naturally to memorizing a page of text as 

 young ducks to water. In fact, they come to us with no other 

 ideas of education. Like many other mammalia, they are born 

 blind — to the world of natural objects — and, worse than all, they 

 learn to read before they acquire the power of sight. But, thanks 

 to the Kindergarten system, object-teaching is coming slowly for- 

 ward, and before many generations pass we may hope to have a 

 natural method of education, because then the youth will have 

 grown up under its vitalizing influence. Until then it may be 

 that each teacher will strive to fit his abilities and notions to 

 those of his pupils, and methods will vary and opinions widely 

 differ. It seems all the more important that the ways and means 

 of instruction should have a place in the journals which deal par- 

 ticularly with the subjects taught. 



During the past two years the writer has attempted to lead 

 large classes in the direction which it was hoped would develop 

 individual research. The results have been sufficiently satisfac- 

 tory to warrant a mention of the plan — not for its newness, but 

 that it may draw out criticisms to be used in improving the 

 method, and to suggest a similar trial by those who are similarly 

 situated. The point, in short, of this paper is to show how a 

 sophomore class of thirty-seven members, in an agricultural col- 

 lege, was, the past year, carried through a term of botany last- 

 ing seventeen weeks, and reaching from July 20th until near 

 the middle of November. Three class-room exercises of an hour 

 were held each week, and one afternoon weekly was spent in the 

 botanical laboratory. The class had already taken one full year 

 of botany, with recitation exercises occurring twice per week, and 

 among other work each pupil had made a herbarium of fifty spe- 

 cies, collected, pressed, mounted, and labeled by himself. The 

 class was fully up to the average for colleges of this sort, in both 

 years and ability, and contained fourteen ladies and twenty-three 

 gentlemen. No text-book was used, and all formal lectures were 

 dispensed with. The work assigned for the term was placed un- 

 der five heads, namely : 1, herbarium ; 2, economic subjects ; 3, 

 orders ; 4, topics of research ; 5, laboratory work. In the first 

 place, fifty species, neatly mounted on standard herbarium paper, 

 were added to the herbarium of the previous term. Each student 

 in the lecture-room was assigned a chair with a broad table-arm 

 for holding specimens, hand-lens, etc. During the first six weeks 

 the class exercises were devoted to plant analyses. The specimens 

 were collected in abundance by the students, in turn, and from 

 three to five species were classified during the hour. Dried speci- 

 mens of the several genera under consideration were brought 



