coFFMAx] SECONDARY SCHOOL AGRICULTURE 95 



geography. We cannot dip into the natural sciences and take out 

 a piece here and another piece there and make them the separate 

 chapters of a science of agriculture. Xo science ever grew or 

 was ever organized in that way. It is true that each of these 

 sciences affords many opportunities for the teaching of many ag- 

 ricultural facts, but that does not mean when they have been 

 thus taught that one has a science of agriculture. The teaching 

 of agriculture through all of the sciences would probably mean 

 that it would be done by individual specialists in a haphazard 

 manner. At least the primary facts of agriculture would not 

 be organized with reference to its purposes. Xo university or 

 college has as yet demonstrated that it can satisfactorily carry out 

 such a scheme. If it has not succeeded in these higher institu- 

 tions what can we expect of it in the high schools where the 

 teachers of the various sciences have a much more limited train- 

 ing? 



The difficulty with which we are confronted in our high 

 schools may be made clear by a personal illustration. As a sup- 

 erintendent of a city school system a few years ago it was my 

 misfortune to be compelled to secure a teacher of botany for each 

 of three consecutive years. The first was a student of the histol- 

 ogy of plants. We bought him a number of compound micro- 

 scopes and supplied him with an abundance of text-books and 

 supplementary materials. His students made beautiful drawings 

 of the slides they prepared under his tuition for the microscopes. 

 They learned the minute structure of many of the forms of plant 

 life of that region. 



The second teacher knew nothing about this phase of botany. 

 He had specialized on trees. So we purchased a number of Ap- 

 gar's Manual of Trees and such other supplementary books as 

 he wanted. W'e rearranged our program so as to make it pos- 

 sible for him to take his class into the forests round about. The 

 students learned the names of the trees and the families to which 

 they belonged. In the meantime our valuable miscropes remained 

 throughout the year carefully stored away in a glass case. 



The third year we had a man whose information about the 

 histology of plants or the study of trees was too meagre to enable 

 him to teach either of those phases of botany. He was a sys- 

 temist. He taught his class how to classify all sorts of plants. 

 They carried into the laboratory leaf after leaf, and plant after 

 plant, and by the use of a manual each of these was carefully 

 traced down until its correct Latin name could be given, after 

 which it was pressed, put in the herbarium and properly labelled. 



