President's Address 



Botanical Instruction In Colleges 



Bruce Fink. 



Recent years have brought great expansion in botanical 

 knowledge and notable changes in methods of instruction. It 

 means much more to be a good teacher of Botany now than it 

 did two or three decades ago, when more teachers were beginning 

 with scanty knowledge and faulty methods, which would scarcely 

 be tolerated in a college teacher today. 



With the widening of the botanical horizon has come in- 

 creased difficulty in selecting material, especially for first courses. 

 Shall we teach morphology, physiology, taxonomy, or all of 

 these and more? This question and the other one of what should 

 be selected from the rapidly increasing mass of material must 

 be settled by every teacher of the science. The temptation is 

 to give attention to matter at the expense of method, and to 

 force upon the student more than he can possibly be expected to 

 assimilate. 



At a recent meeting of the Ohio Academy of Sciences, it was 

 the prevailing opinion that the lecture or other class room work 

 in sciences should precede the laboratory work, the main argu- 

 ment being that more ground can be covered in this manner. 

 There is great doubt about this method being best for the teacher 

 of Botany, except perhaps with students so far advanced in the 

 science that their botanical imaginations are thoroughly developed. 



Assuming that a first course should deal with morphology 

 and physiology, the first hours may well be spent in the labora- 

 tory, studying structures and functions in some plant. There 

 the microscope and the hand lens should supplement the eye, 

 and some simple physioligical experiments should be performed. 



