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"There has been among teachers of botany an idea, now fast 

 vanishing, that ecology is at once the easiest and the most in- 

 teresting department of the science. * * * High school pupils can 

 learn a few useful facts about such matters as heliotropic and 

 geotropic movements of plants, the occurrence and meaning of 

 deciduousness among trees, insect pollination, competition, the 

 concept of a plant formation and a plant association. Further 

 they cannot profitably go. 



"Though the belief that plant ecology is 'easy' is obsolescent, 

 an equally pernicious notion that plant physiology is 'hard' still 

 prevails. It has, in some instances, gone so far as to lead to 

 something perilously near to the complete omission of the subject 

 from the text-books and the class work. Of course the more 

 recondite matters, such as the causes of the movements of liquids 

 in the plant body, the precise function and modus operandi of 

 stomatal movements, the details of sexual reproduction in many 

 groups, and a host of other topics are difficult enough to tax the 

 energies of a Pfeffer, a Strasburger, or a DeBary. But there are 

 so many simple, manageable things for the young beginner to 

 work out ! It is far easier for him to discover for himself the fact 

 and roughly to measure the amount of transpiration, to prove 

 the dependence of starch production on light, and roughly to 

 ascertain the temperature limits within which germination of a 

 given kind of seed is possible than to learn by his own observations 

 anything worth while about fibro-vascular bundles or even to 

 master the details of pollination in Asdepias or most orchids. 



"A few words should here be said about the very prevalent 

 idea, that since plants have been evolved from the unicellular 

 condition to that of the most complicated assemblage of struc- 

 tures found among seed plants, the pupil's knowledge of them 

 should be gained along the same road. Perhaps with students 

 of twenty this might be true, though one of the best all-round 

 teaching professors of botany whom I have known, found that 

 his classes of college beginners in the subject could not do any- 

 thing like the year's work when they began with the cell as a unit 

 that they could and did when they began with readily visible 

 and somewhat familiar forms. It is doubtful whether the 



