34 Kansas Academy of Science. 



Used properly, the inductions, hypotheses, classifications and 

 theories of the scientist have, as we all know, high educational 

 value. Even the classifications, the most formal of all the work of 

 the scientist, serve an excellent purpose in training students. 



Some classifications of ideas or names, such as those found in 

 the dictionaries and cyclopedias, are too simple to be in them- 

 selves valuable factors in education, but many of the classifications 

 of animals, plants, minerals and chemicals are so exact in the use 

 of terms, and are so complex in structure., that no student can run 

 down to its appropriate species any specimen in natural history 

 without having previously made a careful study of the form to be 

 classified. The classification of plants in Gray's " Flora " has served 

 as a stimulus to exact observation to a generation of amateur bota- 

 nists, and so have similar works on vertebrates, birds, and insects. 



I do not need to advocate in this presence the cause of the 

 schoolmaster who wishes to make better naturalists and scientists 

 of his pupils; but I fear, sometimes, the most of us need to be 

 urged, to make more strenuous efforts in this direction. 



With a view to throwing light on the problem of conflicting 

 evidence in court-rooms, Professor Von Liszt, of Berlin, Germany, 

 arranged a quarrel between two of his students, the other twenty- 

 three to have no suspicion that the event was planned. 



At the appointed time the quarrel took place, amid tremendous 

 excitement. The professor finally put a stop to it. A week later 

 he lectured on "Evidence," having in the meantime taken the testi- 

 mony of all those who witnessed the quarrel. Out of the twenty- 

 three well-educated young men, the testimony of no two was 

 exactly alike. No fewer than eight difPerent persons were named 

 as the originator of the fight, in which, actually, but two had been 

 concerned. 



The actual firing of a pistol was accurately described by nearly 

 all, but there were four separate versions of the period of the quar- 

 rel at which it was fired. The professor's way of quelling the dis- 

 turbance was described in eight different versions. 



"You are like most persons," Professor Von Liszt told his stu- 

 dents after reporting the result of this inquiry, "You look, but you 

 do not see. It is not wilful perjurers who impede the course of 

 justice — such persons are few — but careless people like yourselves, 

 who have not trained the eye to report to the brain accurately what 

 it beholds." 



Throughout the major portion of the work in botany at the 

 State Normal, students are asked to report what they see and not 



