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that is to be, on the other. Of course, a teacher soon learns to 

 make many adjustments to the needs and capabilities of his 

 pupils, and, indeed, is forced to do so, but in general the teacher's 

 own college science course is only slightly modified to fit the 

 high school pupil, and the result is a misfit. The high school 

 needs the help of broadly-trained men and women to make its 

 work serve better the needs of its pupils ; not only is this true in 

 the science work, but in other lines as well. 



Looked at from this point of view the remedy for the lack of 

 real and lasting interest in the botany work would certainly not 

 be to add more morphology. That is quite the worst thing that 

 we could do. Nor would it help to provide more artificial keys 

 for the identification of plants, in the hope of stimulating interest 

 through plant analysis. Neither should I advocate more ecology 

 or more plant physiology, considering these merely as subdivi- 

 sions of the science of botany. 



The remedy lies, it seems to me, more in relating botany to the 

 other life-sciences — zoology, including human physiology, par- 

 ticularly hygiene, thus making it a body of organized knowledge 

 of the greatest value and interest to the adolescent. If given in 

 the second year of the high school, it should follow a course in 

 general science, given from an evolutionary and synthetic point 

 of view. There are many problems in connection with such a 

 course. Of these, I may mention three : first, how to bring the 

 work in close touch with the life of the pupil and make it an in- 

 fluence for good, for example, in inculcating the love of out-of- 

 doors, or in affecting personal and social sanitation ; second, how 

 to select for emphasis the evolutionary factors or elements which 

 serve to bind the whole into a consistent body of knowledge, 

 eliminating the useless details ; and third, how to present this 

 body of knowledge historically, as itself an organic growth now 

 only in its infancy. Were these problems in teaching solved I 

 believe there would be no question as to the practical value of 

 botany, nor as to the interest aroused at high school age, nor as 

 to the permanancy of this interest in a relatively greater number 

 of pupils than at present. Henry A. Kelly. 



Ethical Culture School, 

 New York City. 



