1 THE NA TURE- S TUD Y RE VIE W 



[3: l-JAN., 1907 



botany in this way and I well remember how we avoided most of the 

 trees, ferns, and grasses, and all of the sedges. We felt that they 

 were quite beyond our possibilities. Then too, we paid no attention 

 whatever to the mosses, the liverworts, the fungi, the lichens, and 

 all the swarm of freshwater algae, — those green growths that abound 

 in the pools, ponds and brooks. But in spite of all this we learned 

 a good deal about the plants of the fields, the thickets, the swamps 

 and the forests,- and in addition we knew where the plants grew that 

 we had collected and studied. 



With the coming in of the "laboratory idea" field work largely fell 

 into disuse, if not disrepute. The pupil's material was brought to 

 him from somewhere, possibly from a supply house hundreds of miles 

 away. To the pupil such a specimen had no place in nature. He 

 thought of it as occupying a bottle or a box in the laboratory, and 

 not as a plant growing in some pond, field or forest. This was the 

 laboratory idea carried to an extreme, and without doubt the pupil 

 missed a good deal by not seeing plants in their natural habitats; and 

 yet one must not overlook the fact that such a pupil knew some 

 things that the earlier type of pupil did not. Thus the laboratory 

 pupil could tell you about the spores of the mushrooms, and had a 

 a pretty clear notion of how they serve to propagate these plants, 

 while the old-time pupil paid no attention whatever to them. The 

 laboratory trained pupil may not have collected mushrooms in the field, 

 but he studied them in the laboratory, and when he found them 

 in rambles in field or forest he was able to recognize them at once. 

 Moreover, since he studied specimens that were supplied to him he was 

 not dependent upon the chance finding of plants for his studies, and 

 thus was able to take up the examinations of the different kinds in 

 their proper sequence. He had thus another great advantage over 

 his old-time predecessor in that he could begin with simple forms and 

 pass regularly to those which are successively higher and higher. 

 He thus quickly gained some idea of the general classification of 

 plants, which he could not if compelled to depend upon his own 

 efforts in the collection of material from the country about him. 



From what I have already said it can be seen that I am not one 

 of those who hold that field work is one of the absolutely essential 

 things in all stages of the pupil's study. On the contrary I have 

 long since realized that there is a time to do field work, and a time 

 to refrain from doing it. In the words of Scripture "there is a time 

 for all things," but it does not follow that we must always make time 



