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PREFACE 



MOST of the recent text-books of botany, excellent 

 as many of them are, fail to meet the conditions of the 

 average public school, where expensive laboratory appli- 

 ances are out of the question, and time to make a proper 

 use of them is equally unattainable. It is one of the 

 anomalies of our educational system that the study of 

 plants, if provided for at all, should be confined mainly to 

 city schools, where it is necessarily carried on under disad- 

 vantageous conditions, while it is almost entirely neglected 

 in the country, where the great laboratory of nature stands 

 invitingly open at every schoolhouse door. 



The writer believes that this neglect is largely due to the 

 want of a text-book suited to general use, in which the 

 subject is treated in a manner at once simple, practical, and 

 scientific. It is with a desire to meet this need and to 

 encourage a more general adoption of botanical studies in 

 the public schools that the present work has been under- 

 taken. It aims, in the first place, to lead the pupil to nature 

 for the objects of each lesson ; and in the second place, 

 to provide that the proper material shall be always avail- 

 able by so arranging the lessons that each subject will be 

 taken up at just the time of the year when the material for 

 it is most abundant. In this way the study can be carried 

 on all the year round, a plan which will be found much 

 better than crowding the whole course into a few weeks 

 of the spring term. 



In order to provide for this all the year round course it 



has been necessary to depart somewhat from the usual order 



of arrangement, but years of experience have convinced the 



writer that the advantages to be gained by having fresh 



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