344 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



highest importance ; they should be not only negatively good, that is, 

 innocent, but, when possible, really powerful, that is, brought from the 

 depths of things, and able to sustain all the future life of the mind 

 possessing them. And, since direct perception of facts must precede 

 reasoning upon the inferences which may be di'awn from them, it is 

 not only legitimate but important to impress the imagination with 

 typical and fundamental facts, long before these can be reasoned 

 upon, or their laws really understood. This is my lengthy reason for 

 the simple experiment of studying the growth of beans on a saucer 

 of cotton-wool — experiment designed not to teach physiology, but to 

 make an early revelation of life. 



In this connection, however, is worth noting a special reason for 

 preferring the flower to the leaf for early study. It is agreed that the 

 functions of living organisms are too difficult for such study ; never- 

 theless, it is desirable to indicate functions when possible, because the 

 fact of function is one eminently characteristic of living things. Now, 

 the function of the leaf is respiration, which can not possibly be made 

 intelligible to the child. It involves chemical relations, which are the 

 latest appreciable, and can not be exhibited except by means of ex- 

 periments, for which the young child is quite unprepared. The ab- 

 sence of the visible phenomena of animal respiration, moreover, that 

 is of the exhalation of the breath and movements of the thorax, render 

 an attempt to identify the function in plants and animals confusing 

 and apparently contradictory. 



On the other hand, the function of the flower — reproduction — can 

 be rendered perfectly intelligible to the child, when he is told that the 

 pollen feeds the ovules, which then visibly grow into seeds, while the 

 ovary ripens to fruit. This statement seems to the child in accord- 

 ance with his own most urgent personal necessities, and in the com- 

 mon facts of feeding and growth he finds himself linked with other 

 organisms in Nature. It is quite congenial to the normal fetichism of 

 a young child's mind to regard plants as animals ; and legends of 

 dryads are as natural to him as to the infancy of the human race. 



But the assimilation of animals to plants through the molecular 

 processes of nutrition common to both (though perhaps unconscious- 

 ly foreshadowed in the story of Narcissus) was not for mankind dis- 

 tinctly formulated until the time of Bichat ; and, for the individual 

 intelligence, its comprehension must be deferred until nearly to adoles- 

 cence. 



3. I must plead guilty to an inaccuracy when, quoting from 

 memory, I said that Miss Youmans recommended her pupils to draio 

 the leaves that they studied. But I fell into the error all the more 

 readily, because such a direction entirely commended itself to my own 

 judgment. Nor can I agree at all with the reasons which Miss You- 

 mans now advances in opposition to this method. If the aim at the 

 time be not to learn botany, but " to cultivate the observing powers 



