PLANTING AND CARE OF TREES 25 



estry classes nee^ not be discussed in this connection. An inti- 

 mate practical knowledge of trees is the goal of their existence. 



Tree Study in High Schools and Colleges — Botany in colleges 

 and in high schools under college influences gives in general 

 little encouragement for outdoor work. This is due in part 

 to the relative ease of handling students indoors, but more 

 perhaps to a reaction against the somewhat narrow botany 

 of the earlier naturalists which consisted largely in becoming fa- 

 miliar with the mere names of the individual plant species. In 

 consequence, students after taking an elementary course in the sub- 

 ject sometimes complain that of the common forms they meet every 

 day they are no better able to tell one plant from another. 



Botany, aside from the subject matter it may offer to the bot- 

 anical specialist, to the horticulturist, or to the forester, may rea- 

 sonably be included with other sciences in a general college course 

 upon tAvo grounds : — First, the power it may be expected to give 

 the student to observe accurately, to form correct conclusions from 

 the facts in hand and to express his thoughts with clearness: 

 Second, the accumulation of a body of facts that will tend to make 

 the world about us more intelligible and life, therefore, more in- 

 teresting. Too frequently we forget that the student and the 

 student's viewpoint are of more importance than botany and the 

 botanist's viewpoint. True a certain amount of knowledge of 

 the internal structure and physiology of plants is necessary to an 

 understanding of their life activities and rightly forms a promi- 

 nent part of the result obtained from a general course in botany. 

 To make anatomy and physiology the total result is to take some- 

 what the viewpoint of those books on systematic botany which 

 refuse to consider a plant that has acquired enough human in- 

 terest to be brought into cultivation, unless the form in question 

 is also found growing wild. 



The questions of a layman will often give us a clue as to what 

 parts of our subject are of most general interest. The inner mech- 

 anisms and functions of a bird may be nearly of as much interest to 

 the laboratory specialist as they are of value to the bird itself, yet 

 they are of minor interest to the general public. In the writer^s 

 experience. Bird Study and Tree Study form two of the most 

 popular summer school courses, and largely it is believed because 

 their air has been an out-of-doors acquaintance with common forms 



