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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXI. No. 792 



truth I agree that he is the best teacher 

 who is also an active investigator, but I 

 maintain that in the case of college teach- 

 ers the investigation ought to have some 

 kind of connection with the teaching. This 

 is entirely possible, for a vast and fruitful 

 tield for research lies open in educational 

 organization, in the introduction of more 

 logical, useful and illuminating topics, ex- 

 periments and methods, in the fitting of 

 science better to the gTowing mind, in 

 local floras and the natural history of com- 

 mon plants, in ways for better collation 

 and diffusion of knowledge. After all, it is 

 the spirit of investigation that is the mat- 

 ter of value to the teacher, not the results. 

 A contemplation of the status of much of 

 the investigation put forth by busy teach- 

 ers somehow seems to suggest a saying of 

 one of our senior botanists, who was in his 

 youth somewhat of a botanical explorer, 

 and always a genial wit. Apropos of the 

 making of bread in camp he has been heard 

 to remark that "it may not result in very 

 good bread, but it's great for cleaning the 

 hands." In investigation as elsewhere, re- 

 sults are most surely and economically won 

 by experts, selected, trained and devoted 

 to that work. The college teacher would 

 do better not to waste his strength on a 

 field in which he can be little better than 

 an amateur, especially when there lies open 

 another in which he can himself be an ex- 

 pert, and that is in educational-scientific 

 investigation. 



From this which the university ought 

 not to do, I turn now to things which it 

 leaves undone. It is not giving to those 

 who are to be college teachers certain 

 knowledge and training which are indis- 

 pensable to good teaching. Thus, it does 

 not insist that they shall know the common 

 facts about the familiar plants around 

 them. The old type of botanical course, 

 consisting in the study of the morphology 



and identification of the higher plants, is 

 gone forever, not because it was not good, 

 but because the expansion of knowledge has 

 given us something still better. Yet the 

 knowledge involved in the old course is in- 

 dispensable to every teaching botanist, and 

 I would have a requirement made that no 

 person could be recommended as a com- 

 petent botanical teacher for a college until 

 he had spent at least two summers of active 

 field work on the critical study of some 

 flora. Again, most of our university- 

 trained teachers know nothing more of the 

 historical or biographical phases of the 

 sciences than they may have picked up inci- 

 dentally. Tet for purposes of teaching, a 

 knowledge of the history of the science 

 itself, and of its relations to other great 

 matters, is vastly important, in part for the 

 favorable background it offers for the 

 projection of our present-day knowledge, 

 and in part for the purpose of placing the 

 dramatic, heroic and humanistic aspects of 

 the science at the disposal of the teacher. 

 Again, the teacher may go forth from the 

 university without any other than the most 

 fragmentary knowledge of laboratory ad- 

 ministration, although there is a rapidly de- 

 veloping technique of efficient and econom- 

 ical management of laboratory construction, 

 furniture, apparatus, supplies, materials, 

 manipulation ; and the lack of any training 

 in these is one reason why our science is so 

 often disgraced, and our influence weak- 

 ened, by slovenly botanical laboratories. 

 Again, the teacher takes up the instruction 

 of young people without any knowledge 

 whatever of the results, very valuable, all 

 imperfect though they still are, which have 

 been won in the scientific study of the psy- 

 chology of the adolescent mind. And 

 finally he receives no training in the colla- 

 tion and exposition of scientific knowledge, 

 a subject of such importance that I shall 

 speak of it in a moment apart. Training in 



