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of the botanical text-books most widely used in the high schools 

 of this country has had only a high school experience. Another 

 phase of our belief in the sufficiency of systems is found in the 

 utterly unpractical character of many of the exercises or experi- 

 ments proposed for the student in some of our books. These 

 recommendations have obviously been worked out in the comfort 

 of the study chair, and have never been actually tested in use by 

 their suggestors ; yet they are presented in a way to make the 

 student feel that he is either negligent or stupid if he fails to work 

 them. These theoretically constructed schemes for elementary 

 teaching, and these recommendations of untried and impracticable 

 tasks for students, sometimes run riot in company with sweeping 

 denunciations of our present laboratory courses, and suggestions 

 for their replacement by hypothetical field courses, utterly regard- 

 less of the fact that the former, whatever their faults, have been 

 evolved in actual administrative adaptation to the real conditions 

 of elementary work, while the proposed substitutes are wholly 

 untried, and in the light of actual conditions, wholly impracti- 

 cable. 



On the other hand, there is one particular in which we have 

 not system enough, and that is in the standardization of nature 

 study and elementary science courses. I have already mentioned 

 the advantage the humanities have in the approximate standardi- 

 zation of their instruction throughout the educational system, 

 and towards this end for the sciences we ought to bend every effort. 

 For one thing we should give all possible aid and comfort to our 

 nature-study experts in their efforts to develop a worthy system 

 of nature study in the grades. Again, the peculiar relation of 

 preparatory schools to colleges in this country makes it imperative 

 that we develop standard elementary courses which any school 

 can give with assurance that they will be accepted for entrance to 

 any college. Happily we are here upon firm ground, for we al- 

 ready possess such a standard course, or unit, in that formulated 

 by a committee of botanical teachers, now the committee on edu- 

 cation of this society. This course is formulated upon the syn- 

 thetic principle, that is, it selects the most fundamental and illumi- 

 nating matters offered by the science without regard to its artificial 



