113 
The fields of endeavor must be as broad as the wildwoods 
that the Wild Flower Preservation Society of America would 
protect, and the methods of protection as numerous as the plants 
the society would preserve, and yet but one plan presents itself to 
me as iran important. 
Enlist the services of the school teachers as the most service- 
able of ae and through them reach the children with whom 
the future of the wild flowers rests in far greater degree than with 
their elders. 
My school days were over long before the school teachers of 
New York were expected to convert each member of a most cos- 
mopolitan class into botanist and geologist, artist and artizan, 
nature student and linguist, regardless of previous condition, 
nationality or temperament. 
Consequently, my first introduction to botany was through 
the kindly offices of a young country schoel teacher, at an age 
considerably past the schoolboy period, when I could best appre- 
ciate real beauty of face and form and mind. 
Let me confess she possessed all three to a marked degree. 
This I distinctly remember, but all that remains to me of her 
botanical instruction is the recollection that I armed her with a 
razor to aid in her researches afield on her return to her country 
charges, 
Even then I loved the wild flowers too well to enjoy dissecting 
them and with the additional disadvantages of the teacher's 
absence, multiple regrets totally foreign to botany, and the im- 
pression that the delightful study was mainly based on the destruc- 
tion of all things rare and beautiful to be studied, is it strange 
that botanical knowledge halted with me there ? 
I have since learned much on lines less destructive, and to 
me, far pleasanter. So would say, beyond all things urge the 
teachers to relegate the dissecting knife to the realms of tools of 
last resort, and their use to a period when the maturer mind of 
the pupil would lead him ever to preserve rather than destroy. 
the necessity of the knife in the identification of a strange 
or puzzling fruit or flower I am fully aware; but placed in the 
hand of a child what surer guide could be afforded to the mani- 
