174 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



up and keep before the mental vision a distinct image of the thing 

 reasoned about. In fact, what is called the scientific imagination 

 seems almost wanting in many minds until a severe course of training 

 in science arouses the dormant faculty, and develops into the actual 

 and the active what otherwise would have remained an unnoticed and 

 neglected potentiality. The consequence is, that the teacher who de- 

 pends on verbal statements alone can never be sure that the ideas so 

 clear to himself are correct, if at all apprehended by his pupils, and 

 that these are not increasing their ignorance rather than their knowl- 

 edge. Many minds which seem to become sluggish, or to wither away 

 when fed with what to them are the dry husks of words, are roused 

 to activity and intelligence when they are directed to the study of 

 things and the relations of things, when they are brought face to face, 

 so to speak, with the actual phenomena of the world around and within 

 them. 



But before I pass from this let me point out that the guinea-and- 

 feather experiment, if successfully performed, is about as bad an ex- 

 ample of an educative experiment as could well be selected. The bare 

 fact to be observed would stand out too distinctly, too completely dis- 

 entangled from other phenomena to give it any value in training the 

 observing faculties of any but mere infants, while the inferences and 

 deductions from the results of the experiment are too abstruse for 

 any but those who have advanced some way in quantitative analysis 

 of phenomena. Moreover, the mere experimental result can be ob- 

 tained without any elaborate apparatus, while the deduced propositions 

 can be, and in actual practice generally are, arrived at by simpler 

 means. In truth, the experiment is not one which should be presented 

 to the pujjil in order to deduce from it that the earth's attraction de- 

 pends, not on the nature of a body, but merely on its mass, but he 

 should be skillfully led to suggest this experiment as a test of the 

 truth of this proposition. In fact, it is an experiment of verification, 

 not an experiment of discovery. 



It was my intention, when I consented to address you on this sub- 

 ject, to present you with an outline of how actually to proceed in order 

 to give children a systematic training in observation, selecting plants 

 as the objects for examination. Botany has been called a science of 

 mere names, and it must be confessed it has too often been presented 

 as such ; but, rightly treated, it offers a wide field and ample scope for 

 observation of the forms, the positions, and the functions of the va- 

 rious parts of plants, of the relations of these parts to each other, and 

 of their modifications and adaptations to varying conditions, as well 

 as for many other observations just such as children in our primary 

 classes are capable of making. But all, and more than all, I purposed 

 doing, has been done and so well done by Miss Eliza A. Youmans, in 

 her " First Book of Botany," that I believe it will be better to refer 

 you direct to that work, rather than to enter on details here. If one 



