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1905] NaTuRE Stupy—No. 27. 129 
permanent inspiration can come only through knowledge. It 
would be pessimistic and uncharitable to hold that no good work 
_in Nature Study can be done by teachers who are not scientists ; 
it would be insanely optimistic to hold that we can ever do the 
best work in Nature Study until we have a corps of teachers who 
have done enough work in science to catch the scientific spirit. 
Nature Study for elementary schools and natural science may be 
very different things--indeed they are different--but their difference 
is a difference in method, in spirit, in point of approach, in 
quantum, in continuity, in intensity, in purpose, rather than a 
difference in knowledge demanded of the teacher. 
Only those who have tried to map outacourse in Botany that 
will have some organic significance and yet be comprised in a 
dozen lessons, know the difficulties that meet a teacher in planning 
a course for a Summer School. The course followed at the Ottawa 
school comprised Germination, Roots, Stems and Buds, Leaves 
the Plants’ Stomach, Plants and Insects, Plant Societies, Plants 
and their Environment, Monocotyledons and Dicotyledons, Plant 
Structure, Seed Dispersal and A Flower Garden. These subjects 
served as centres round which it was possible to group the most 
elementary and essential facts about the way plants live and the 
work they do. 
It had constantly to be kept in mind that a summer class is 
made up of students having widely varying information of plant 
life. Some have a fair knowledge of elementary botany, others 
know almost nothing of the subject. Under such circumstances 
only one line of action was possible—to begin at the bottom. The 
growth of a plant, like the life of a human being, is in its way an 
epic. This epic may, like the story of the Prodigal Son, be told 
in a hundred ways, and yet every one of the hundred may embody 
all that is essential. 
Germination was illustrated by a series of experiments. Three 
weeks previous to the lesson, germinating cases were prepared. 
Each of these consisted of two pieces of glass 16 in. x 5 in. witha 
layer of moistened cotton wool between. Just under the upper 
glass a layer of black cloth was stretched over the cotton. Then 
each day a single seed was inserted between the glass and the dark 
cloth. The moistened cotton behind the seed supplied the water. 
As the germinating seed was between the glass and the black 
cloth, the whole process was plainly visible. At the end of fifteen 
days the story of the germination of every seed under observation 
was told in fifteen chapters of twenty-four hours each. Experi- 
ments of ihis kind were made with peas, beans, scarlet runners, 
barley, Indian corn, flax, vetch, white lupin, radish and Boston 
Ivy. This selection gave an opportunity to observe seeds of slow 
germination and seeds of rapid germination, seeds with one 
