156 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XVII. No. 421. 



mind to distinguish fact from fancy. Since 

 much of it evidently is not so, the tendency 

 of the average reader will be either to dis- 

 believe everything that seems improbable, or 

 else with child-like faith to swallow both 

 Jonah and the whale. That the facts of na- 

 ture should be presented in a pleasant and 

 attractive form will be admitted by all, but 

 for this purpose it is not necessary to adopt 

 the style of the comic weekly. It tends to 

 discredit the facts. The author has been very 

 careful in his selection of matter, but his 

 treatment will not, we think, develop a pop- 

 ular interest in insects. 



Nathan Baijks. 



BOTANICAL NOTES. 

 pharmacognosy. 

 In this department of botany, which is 

 scarcely entered by professional botanists in 

 America, there should be found opportunity, 

 as in Europe, for that critical study of cells 

 and tissues which so delights a certain class 

 of students. We have sometimes felt that pro- 

 fessors in German universities were to be en- 

 vied because of the easy way they have of 

 putting a dull student at work on some root 

 or bark, expecting no more from him than a 

 year or two of patient sectioning, drawing and 

 describing. The work is original, and yet 

 there is no danger that the inexperienced and 

 really incompetent student will attempt to 

 make any generalizations, nor that he will ask 

 his instructor to help him make certain ' con- 

 clusions.' We are reminded of all this by a 

 volume entitled ' A Course in Botany and 

 Pharmacognosy; by Professor Kraemer, of the 

 Philadelphia College of Pharmacy, which has 

 just appeared. The book was written ' to 

 meet the individual needs of the author in 

 his work as a teacher of botany and pharma- 

 cognosy,' and as such is worthy of serious at- 

 tention. Any book which is the outcome of 

 a successful teacher's experience is a contri- 

 bution to the pedagogics of the subject with 

 which it deals, and on that account, if on no 

 other, should be of interest to every teacher 

 or student of that subject. Professor 

 Kraemer's book apparently embodies his so- 

 lution of a problem in pedagogies, and ap- 



parentlj' the problem is how to give the stu- 

 dent of drugs enough knowledge of botany to 

 enable him to study dried roots, stems, leaves, 

 etc., with sufficient intelligence to make it 

 worth his while to do the work. We confess 

 to not liking this way of preparing a student 

 for his work by a ' short cut ' in botany, but 

 no doubt the author dislikes it too. He faces 

 a ' condition, not a theory ' which is quite too 

 common in schools of pharmacy and medicine, 

 in which inadequately prepared men must be 

 given technical instruction when they should 

 be at work on the underlying and antecedent 

 subjects. What can one do with a student in 

 pharmacognosy who has not had a good train- 

 ing in plant histology, and systematic botany? 

 He must give such ' short-cut ' training as the 

 time will permit, and then push his half-pre- 

 pared men into their technical work ; and who 

 can affirm that this is not the best solution, 

 under the circumstances? 



The book before us devotes one hundred 

 pages to a rapid and rather superficial exam- 

 ination of the cell, the vegetative, and the re- 

 productive parts of the plant, and this is fol- 

 lowed by over two hundred pages relating to 

 crude and powdered drugs, a few pages in 

 regard to reagents, and finally the descriptions 

 of the seventeen plates at the end of the 

 volume. Throughout the first part the whole 

 intent appears to be to prepare the student 

 in the shortest possible time to know the appli- 

 cation of every term which he is likely to 

 meet in his subsequent work, and to know how 

 to treat the different specimens he has to take 

 up. The student is not made a botanist, by any 

 means; he is put in possession of a lot of 

 empirical information so that he may be able 

 to make some sort of study of drugs. And 

 no doubt as long as the colleges of medicine 

 and pharmacy admit such illy prepared men, 

 this is a wise course to pursue, and this book 

 thus becomes a useful text for such students. 

 The lesson to be derived from it is that botan- 

 ists should insist that if pharmacognosy be 

 taught at all, the students should have better 

 antecedent preparation, by having taken 

 courses in plant histology and systematic 

 botany. Were this accomplished, pharma- 

 cognosy ■^ould become a part of scientific bot- 



