133 
REVIEWS 
Payne's Manual of Experimental Botany 
This manual is conceived in an excellent spirit, and its 
purpose, as stated in the preface, is ‘‘to teach botany by experi- 
ment." The publisher's announcement describes it as “а 
laboratory manual for a complete high school course, in which 
botany is continually correlated with practical gardening, farm- 
ing, and bacteriology.” In this continuous correlation lies what 
the reviewer considers one of the main weaknesses of the book. 
Undoubtedly the movement to introduce the study of the 
principles of agriculture into secondary schools is a movement in 
the right direction, but why agricultural matter should be 
eternally mixed in with botany until the latter science loses all 
semblance of its real self, it is difficult to comprehend. То read 
(p. 45 et seq.) directions for a high school pupil, as part of a 
course in experimental botany (!) to “visit a farm," and “describe 
a plow" and tell how it is used; to investigate the economic 
problem of "why truck farms abound near cities"; to “visit a 
wheat field at harvest time and observe the process [what process 
is not stated] at each step "; to investigate "the way in which 
the various small fruits and vegetables are gathered and prepared 
for marketing"; to "visit a commission merchant's place of 
business at any season" and “make a list of the products by 
season ” (sic); to describe the process of milling; to “visit a saw- 
mill and see how logs are reduced to various kinds of lumber’”; 
to read this in what professes to be a text book of botany, leaves 
no room for doubt that it is high time to call a halt in the emascu- 
lation of high school botany. Let us teach agriculture, by all 
means, in the proper time and place, but let us not confuse and 
deceive the pupil by making him think that plowing and milling 
and market gardening are a part of the science of botany, any 
more than the daily work of the butcher has anything to do with 
the science of zoólogy. 
To follow the author through the book requires several new 
adjustments of ideas. Thus the first exercise on page 49, to 
* Payne, Frank Owen.—Manual of Experimental Botany, pp. 1-272, figs. 117. 
New York. American Book COME 1912. 
