24 PLANT PHYSIOLOGY 



nars, etc., for welding the scattered knowledge of the laboratory 

 into a well-proportioned whole, and fixing it rightly and firmly 

 in the memory. The course should involve a thorough drill 

 in the essentials of physiological knowledge while fanning every 

 spark of individual originality. Of course each student will 

 have his own place and property, for which he is responsible. 

 He should be given his problem, with full directions as to appara- 

 tus and manipulation, and should then be left to work out results 

 for himself. He should be required to practice all new manip- 

 ulation before applying it to his problem. He should be ex- 

 pected to complete particular problems, and to make full records, 

 before bringing them for the teacher's inspection, since other- 

 wise the student tends to rely more and more upon the teacher 

 at each step, until finally the student is doing the mechanical 

 and the teacher the mental work. But none of these pedagog- 

 ical devices should be allowed to dominate the course or give 

 it a spirit of formalism, but all should be subordinated to the 

 liberal and co-operative spirit in which the work should be 

 carried on. 



A point of considerable importance in the conduct of the 

 course concerns the relation of one student's work with another's. 

 As to this there are two possible plans. In one, which is the 

 older, the laboratory is provided with a piece of each of the 

 approved and purchasable kinds of apparatus, and each stu- 

 dent is assigned a distinct topic for somewhat thorough study; 

 the topics are changed, or exchanged, two or three times in a 

 term, and each student is expected to keep the others informed 

 upon his subject, and likewise to learn from them. On the 

 other plan, which I advocated strongly in the first edition of 

 this book, the students all work together upon one topic, and 

 each performs a series of experiments intended to cover the 

 principal phases of the subject. This plan is only rendered 

 possible by the use of simple and inexpensive appliances. Each 

 method has advantages and drawbacks. The first, or indi- 



stration to an audience, there is an important paper by Pfeffer in Jahrbiicher 

 fur wissenschaftliche Botanik, 35, 1900, 711. 



