EDITORIALS. 
IT HAS SEEMED to the GazeTTE that botanists should interest them- 
selves in the various movements among teachers for the proper teach- 
: ing of science in secondary schools. The problem as 
Botany for to the kind of botany to be taught is not yet settled, and 
Secondary we fear that the advice obtained from the universities has 
Schools not shown a full knowledge of the necessities and the 
conditions. Botanists combined to scout at the old 
“analysis” as an utterly inadequate presentation of botany even as a 
young student should see it, and they did well. Such work is not merely 
partial, but misleading ; an injustice to both pupil and subject. But has 
the proposed substitute proved any more beneficent 1n its results? Has 
the swing of the pendulum from analysis to morphology done for the 
schools what was hoped ? The university laboratories were ready 
enough to show how morphology should be taught, to point out the 
types useful for study, to name the appliances needed, and even to 
write guides and text-books so that no one need go astray. But what 
has been the result of it all? The writer is free to acknowledge, from a 
careful inspection of much of the best work done in the best equipped 
secondary school laboratories, that the advice was a blunder. The reason 
isnot far to seek. It does not lie in lack of preparation on the part of 
the teacher, for universities are annually sending into the schools 
teachers who are trained to do just this kind of work. It lies in the 
age of the pupils and the structure of the schools. Such work has not 
resulted in a clear elementary conception of botany, but in a cleat 
conception of nothing. The pupil is taken away from any possible 
experience of his own in reference to plants, and is introduced to 
structures which he can fit to nothing. ‘The time limits for laboratory 
work are so short even in the most liberal schedules that his observa- 
_ tions cannot be related properly in his own mind, and hence become 
perfunctory and meaningless. He is hurried rapidly from type t° 
type, obtains glimpses of things through the microscope, and if the 
teacher is university bred and young his instruction will take such 
@ philosophical turn that the pupil is hopelessly pefogged. It has 
1896] 
