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York Zoological Park, which embodies an idea much needed in 

 most of our botanical institutions. We ought not to permit the 

 accumulation of dusty and disused articles around laboratories 

 any more than around libraries ; our teaching museums should 

 contain no crowded accumulations of half-spoiled specimens in 

 leaky green bottles, but only a selection of the most important, 

 and those in the best of receptacles well labeled and tastefully 

 displayed. Our experiments with plants should not exhibit dirty 

 pots on untidy tables, but every plant should present an aspect 

 suggestive of considerate care, while all the surrounding appli- 

 ances should glitter with cleanness and stand on a spotless table 

 widely enmargined with space and neatness. One of my friends 

 in a neighboring college has said of the methods of my laboratory 

 that they savor of the old maid. I take pride in this compliment, 

 for it shows I am advancing. All of these qualities of care, neat- 

 ness, concentration upon a few large and worthy things, can be 

 made to appeal greatly to youth, as I have learned from experi- 

 ence. Besides, they are scientific, and they are right. 



There is yet one other phase of this subject of humanism in 

 science teaching w^hich I wish to emphasize. I think we do not 

 make enough use in our teaching of the heroic and dramatic 

 phases of our science, of the biography of our great men and the 

 striking incidents of our scientific history. I know that their use 

 is attended with dangers, dangers of false sentimentalism, of sub- 

 stitution of weak imagery for strong fact, of complication with 

 religious prejudices ; and they should therefore be introduced only 

 as the teacher grows wiser. But when the tactful teacher can 

 employ them to touch the higher emotions of his students, he 

 should do so. The imagination is as necessary a part of the equip- 

 ment of the man of science as of the man of letters or of art, a 

 matter which has been illuminated with all his usual skill by 

 President Eliot in his great address on the new definition of the 

 cultivated man. When Darwin wrote his famous passage on the 

 loss of his esthetic faculties he was a little unfair to his science 

 and a good deal unfair to himself. For he never mentioned the 

 compensation he had found in the intensity of lofty pleasure derived 

 from his acquisition of new truth. Science hath her exaltations no 



