2. ELEMENTS OF BOTANY. 
' Vegetable Physiology treats of the plant in action, how it 
lives, breathes, feeds, grows, and produces others like itself, 
and how it adjusts itself to the conditions which surround it. 
This division of the science also considers how the plant 
attacks other plants or animals (as do mildews and disease- 
germs respectively, for example), or how it is attacked by 
them, what are its diseases and how its life is terminated by 
these, by old age, or by external causes like frost or drought. 
- Many of the topics suggested in this outline cannot well be 
studied in the high school. There is not usually time to 
take up botanical geography or to do much more than men- 
tion the important subject of Heonomice Botany, the study of 
the uses of plants to man. It ought, however, to be possible 
for the student to learn in his high school course a good deal 
about the simpler parts of morphology and of vegetable 
physiology. One does not become a botanist — not even 
much of an amateur in the subject — by reading books about 
botany. It is necessary to study plants themselves, to take 
them to pieces and make out the connection of their parts, to 
examine with the microscope small portions of the exterior 
surface and thin slices of all the variously built materials or 
tissues of which the plant consists. All this can be done 
with living specimens or with those taken from dead parts of 
plants that have been preserved in any suitable way, as by 
drying or by placing in alcohol or other fluids which prevent 
decay. Living plants must be studied in order to ascertain 
what kinds of food they take, what kinds of waste substances 
they excrete, how and. where their growth takes place and 
what circumstances favor it, how they move, and indeed to 
get as complete an idea as possible of what has been called 
the behavior of plants. 
‘Since the most familiar and most interesting plants spring 
from seeds, the beginner in botany can hardly do better than 
to examine at the outset the structure of a few familiar seeds, 
