THE ODOR OF BOTANY ^ge 



carefully the work of field trips in such fashion as to enable students to make, 

 in so far as they can, their own observations and to draw their own conclusions 

 from them. Too often our field trips are simply conducted tours for which 

 the instructor acts merely as guide lecturer. My thumping the tub for the 

 study of living plants reminds me of a taxonomist, long since gone to 

 wherever taxonomists go, who, so accustomed to studying desiccated herbarium 

 specimens, was always ill at ease when he was asked to identify living plants; 

 if he could postpone the identification to a time convenient for him, he 

 pressed, then mounted, the specimen on a herbarium sheet before proceeding 

 to his identification! 



5. Laboratory study in general botany has often become too mechanical, 

 too stereotyped, too restrictive, too dependent upon a laboratory manual 

 which lays it all out on the line and which thus gives students little op- 

 portunity for independent work, for the display of initiative, for the ex- 

 ercise of imagination, for the satisfaction of personal curiosity. Instead 

 of functioning as a consultant or adviser, the laboratory instructor too 

 often becomes a Gruppenjiihrer whose duty it is to lead his students in 

 standardized fashion through a set of detailed directions and who often talks 

 too much in doing so (one of the essential features of good laboratory work, 

 like an essential feature of good library work and of good music, is abundant 

 silence). We should have smaller laboratory sections, better facilities for 

 growing and studying living plants, more experienced and more adroit teach- 

 ers in charge of laboratory classes, and more flexibility for the inquiring 

 student to satisfy his curiosity in ways best suited to his own mind and 

 personality. I shall not soon forget a year which I spent as a laboratory teach- 

 ing assistant under a master teacher of general botany; each laboratory sec- 

 tion of general botany had twenty students, and abundant greenhouse space 

 was available for their work with living plants. At the first meeting of the 

 semester, the professor placed on the main table about twenty jars, each 

 containing seeds of a single plant species. The students were shown the seeds 

 and the greenhouse, were given a few brief preliminary instructions, and were 

 then told that they could do anything they wished with the seeds and the 

 greenhouse for two weeks. My function was simply to stand by, to answer 

 occasional questions, to procure for each student any supplies and simple 

 equipment which he wanted to use in his independent study of the seeds and 

 the seedlings into which they grew, and, at the end of the fortnight, to have 

 the students summarize the results of their work. I have not seen again 

 such display of interest, curiosity, inventiveness, and enthusiasm by general- 

 botany students as this type of laboratory operation elicited. 



I do not suggest that these faults are deliberately conceived and executed, 

 that they are of universal occurrence in general botany courses, or that 

 they have arisen as a consequence of the nature of botany. Some of these 

 shortcomings may be the result of the very human business of getting into 



