«oBisoN] TEXT-BOOKS FOR AGRICULTURE 183 



pend, or possibly I should say, a superficial bird's-eye-view of botany as far 

 as concerns seed plants, and very properly is largely given up (over half of 

 the 90 pages) to the practical application of botanical principles to farm and 

 horticultural practice. 



There is so much here that is built upon the old time-recognized prin- 

 ciples of the science treated in standard text-books that one wonders that the 

 writers of these have failed to realize the social possibilities of their subject. 

 But so long as books are written by the average college professors or for 

 pupils in large cities with little of the facilities for actual practice that a village 

 affords, so long must we expect the books and teachers to direct that work 

 be done within the four walls of a building. This brings us to the third 

 point (3 ) that this book rather differs from the other book cited in that it has 

 a method of treatment, or classification of data and principles, that does not 

 cause one to forget that this thing we call scientific agriculture has, after all, 

 drawn from many other sciences. This treatment at once brings out clearly 

 how very differently the same subject-matter may be handled when viewed 

 as agriculture, and when studied as botany, or any other science. A some- 

 what derailed study of Chapters IX, X, and XI, will illustrate this. 



Chapter IX,* 'Propagation of Plants," deals with: (i ) Seed planting, testing, 

 vitality, harvesting, and preservation, — what might be called applied plant 

 economics. (2) Seed germination, — pure plant physiology, as commonly 

 understood. (3) Variation, treating of food supply and climatic environ- 

 ment, — two phases of what commonly comes under plant ecology; sexual 

 reproduction, which would seem to imply a treatment of plant structure 

 which is absent; and a somewhat philosophical treatment of fixation of 

 variations by selection. The above three topics are grouped in a division 

 * 'Propagation from Seeds." (4) "Propagation from Buds," ranking as 

 one of the two main divisions of the chapter, has less of the structural treat- 

 ment than we might expect; it has a great deal that is treated in good 

 secondary botanies as physiological work, but it makes the social application 

 which few of them do. Were the s[ructural treatment strengthened a little, 

 the combination would be very good; but as it stands the advance in broad 

 conception of what botany may do is a good one. 



In Chapter X, "Improvement of Plants," we have some more work on 

 seeds that writers of standard text-books of botany would probably say 

 should have come with the first part of the previous chapter. This work is 

 still of a functional sort, namely selection, which seems to me to give insuffi- 

 cient fact basis. Later in the chapter, we have a further treatment of the 

 subject of varieties, the originating of new ones that is a continuation of one 

 phase of the preceding chapter. This goes into cross fertilization, which 



