PREFACE 



This book is written in recognition of the fact that to 

 nearly all college students an introductory course in Botany 

 is part of a general education, and not a preparation for a 

 professional botanical career. The distinction is important 

 because our existent courses are largely adapted, even though 

 unconsciously on our part, to the latter end. The needs in 

 the two cases are not the same, though the difference is less 

 in matter and method than in proportion and emphasis. 

 All students alike need that personal contact with specific 

 realities, and that exercise in verifiable reasoning, which 

 laboratory courses render possible. Knowledge, however, 

 is valuable to the specialist in proportion to its objective 

 importance, but is useful to the general student in accordance 

 with its bearing on the actions and thoughts of mankind. 

 In the one case the demands of the science are paramount 

 and in the other the interests of the student. 



This aim to provide for the general rather than the special 

 student will explain certain characteristics of the book, — 

 notably its emphasis upon the larger and more evident 

 phenomena, its attention to the interpretation or "prin- 

 ciple" of things, and its full consideration of man's rela- 

 tions to plants. Indeed, the book may be described as an 

 attempt to present and interpret the humanly important 

 aspects of plant nature in the light of our modern scientific 

 knowledge. For the same reason the book is deliberately 

 conservative, and adopts only such statements and views 

 as have passed the test of wide criticism, and attained to 

 the impersonal, and non-institutional, validity of science. 



The book is intended to be used in conjunction with sys- 

 tematic laboratory work, around which is thus to be welded 



