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of respiration in man and their adaptations, sees a deeper meaning 

 in respiration as a vital process. The same thing applies to the 

 great facts of sex reproduction, inheritance, and eugenics. Our 

 course requires that we work with living things that throw light 

 on the fundamental problems of life. 



At the risk of being called old fashioned, I do not hesitate to 

 say that the foregoing kind of work is the most important that 

 can be offered in any course in biology. And what are the reasons 

 for not having such a course in every high school? What kind 

 of an education is it that fails to recognize the value of the study 

 of man as a living organism. Mentally and physically, he is the 

 center of all education and he is unified with and bound to these 

 lower organisms by the laws of life. Furthermore, if an addi- 

 tional argument were needed, we know that the study of plants 

 and animals trains him in observation, develops his judgment, give 

 him the method to reason logically, and finally furnishes him with 

 important information about himself. It also opens up a new 

 living world that he will appreciate all his life. 



Recently a father, who by the way is a strong advocate of 

 general science, said to me: "Your biolog>^ work is not making 

 good." I asked him why he thought so and he said that his 

 daughter had taken the course for a year and did not know the 

 names of the trees on the block where they live. This, in his 

 opinion was a serious criticism. My answer to this is that our 

 course requires that we place the emphasis chiefly on important 

 biological problems and that this leaves little time for such 

 superficial work as learning names, even though this is desirable. 

 However, before passing in the course, that daughter had to 

 know the general structure of a root, the way it gets water from 

 the soil, and she had seen this illustrated in the laboratory. 

 She had to know the course of the water through the root, stem, 

 and leaves; and she had seen experimental proof of this. She 

 learned by experiment how plants give off water and something 

 of how food is manufactured. She knew, too, that this tree took 

 in and gave off certain gases and the reason for this exchange. 

 This incident illustrates the type of criticism that we are re- 

 ceiving. In the main, it comes from persons who have no con- 



