Botany as a School-Subject. 5^3 



somewhat resemble bad seed-wheat. I explained matters to him, and 

 asked him whether he had ever observed drabok turn into wheat. 

 He replied that he would not say that it could not turn into it. Then 

 there are our plant diseases, which are getting worse and worse every 

 year, and which should be understood by the average farmer. 

 Then there is the deterioration of the veldt, which concerns chiefly 

 our stock farmers. Everyone knows that stock eats only certain 

 kinds of plant growing in the veldt. This simply means that, unless 

 precautions are taken, the useless kinds get a better chance of propa- 

 gating themselves than their useful competitors, and may^ even 

 dominate the veldt, to the complete, or nearly complete, exclusion of 

 the useful ones. The natural course to adopt, and a course which is 

 adopted by thoughtful farmers, is to give portions of the veldt an 

 occasional rest, to let useful grasses seed occasionally to give them 

 a chance to regain their hold against the weeds. This is common- 

 sense, but it is a deplorable fact that, broadly speaking, the prevailing 

 system of education does not develop commonsense. Huxley has 

 rightlv said that Science is systematised commonsense, and yet we 

 exclude it from the education of our children, either by shutting it 

 out altogether or teaching it, as is done usually with Botany, in a 

 worthless manner. 



What, now, is the moral influence that may be expected from the 

 study of Botany? No one can be brought into constant touch with 

 the beauties and the laws of the organic world without being the 

 better for it. It raises him above the sordid actualities of every-day 

 life, it occupies his mind when out for a walk, it gives him an 

 intellectual companion in whatever part of the globe he may be 

 placed, and, if it is true that bad thoughts and bad deeds are the 

 outcome of idleness, the man or women who can fill up his or her 

 spare moments with a study of Botany has a great deal of the 

 temptation removed which empty minds encounter. But I maintain 

 that Botany does more. It tends to make its students humble, 

 truthful, and straightforward. It makes them humble, because the 

 more it is studied the more one sees how little we know, and how 

 the inward nature of things must be for ever be hidden from us. We 

 talk about protoplasm as the bearer of life, we know approximately 

 its chemical constitution and its reactions, but we shall never know 

 why it is the bearer of life, we shall, e.g., never know why a tiny 

 speck in the seed of a bluegum brought from Australia develops 

 into just such a giant tree of a particular kind as it would in its 

 native home, while another speck develops into a plant of quite a 

 different kind. Hundreds and thousands of similar enigmata cross 

 the path of the thinking student of Botany. They may make him 

 an agnostic, a man who frankly confesses that the fundamental 

 principles of the organic, and, for the matter of that, also of the 

 inorganic world are totally hidden from us, but they will also make 

 him humble and reverent, acknowledging the shortcomings of the 

 human mind and of human powers. I said, further, that the study 

 of Botany makes one truthful and straightforward, as would also 

 the study of any other Science, because such a study is a continuous 



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