\f- FOUNDATIONS OF BOTANY 
earth’s surface. Another subdivision of botany, usually 
studied along with geology, describes the history of plant 
life on the earth from the appearance of the first plants 
until the present time. 
Systematic Botany, or the classification of plants, should 
naturally follow the examination of the groups of seed- 
plants and spore-plants. 
Plant Ecology treats of the relations of the plant to 
the conditions under which it lives. Under this division 
of the science are studied the effects of soil, climate, and 
friendly or hostile animals and plants on the external 
form, the internal structure, and the habits of plants. 
This is in many respects the most interesting department 
of botany, but it has to be studied for the most part out 
of doors. 
Many of the topics suggested in the above outline cannot 
well be studied in the high school. There is not usually 
time to take up more than the merest outline of botanical 
geography, or to do much more than mention the impor- 
tant subject of Economic 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 facts 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 tisswes of which the plant consists. All this 
can be done with living specimens or with those taken 
