SEMI-CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION 85 



no doubt greatly to our benefit. Still the fact that we made no 

 use of the mounted animals in the museum shows that the idea 

 of illustrating the subject by specimens had not yet been adopted 

 in zoology, to say nothing of the laboratory idea, of which 

 apparently no one had yet thought. 



Even the subject of entomology was mainly a textbook study. 

 We memorized so many pages and repeated them as nearly as 

 possible verbatim. Here we looked at specimens brought to 

 the class. There was also some desultory collecting of speci- 

 mens, and now and then a student was seen frantically pawing 

 the air with a "bug-net," in his efforts to capture some beetle, 

 bug, or butterfly. But we were under no supervision as to 

 any field-work we might undertake. A few of us were fortunate 

 enough to be employed in arranging and labeling the college 

 collections under the supervision of the professor, and here we 

 learned much about insects, their appearance, classification, 

 and the practical work of making a scientific collection. It 

 was laboratory work, but none of us recognized it, nor did we 

 ever use the word "laboratory" in connection with it. 



In my own science of botany the work was then mainly con- 

 fined to daily recitations from a textbook, accompanied later 

 by dissections and "analyses" of plants in the classroom, under 

 the direction of the professor. We had a few simple dissecting 

 microscopes which we used in these exercises. Here was no 

 doubt the germ of the laboratory idea as applied to botany. 

 But the purpose was not so much to find out the structure of the 

 plant as to find its name. When that was accomplished we 

 stopped further study of the plant. The name was the impor- 

 tant thing and when it was found there was nothing more to be 

 done, unless perhaps to check it off on the margin of the manual. 

 In pursuance of this phase of botany we were required to do a 

 good deal of field-work. We wandered over the fields, through 

 the woods and swamps, often for long distances, in search of 

 plants whose names we found out and duly recorded. Yet 



