2 ELEMENTS OF BOTANY 
life on the earth from the appearance of the first plants 
until the present time. 
Systematic Botany, or the classification of plants, should 
naturally follow the examination of the groups of seed- 
plants and spore-plants. 
Plant Ecology treats of the relations of the plant to the 
conditions under which it lives. Under this division of 
the science are studied the effects of soil, climate, and 
friendly or hostile animals and plants on the external 
form, the internal structure, and the habits of plants. 
This is in many respects the most interesting department 
of botany, but it has to be studied for the most part 
out of doors. 
Economic Botany is the study of the uses of plants to 
man. 
Many of the topics suggested in the above outline can- 
not well be studied in the high school. It ought, however, 
to be possible for the student to learn in his high-school 
course a good deal about the simpler facts of morphology 
and of vegetable physiology. It is necessary to study 
plants themselves, to take them to pieces and to make out 
the connection of their parts, to examine with the micro- 
scope small portions of the exterior surface and thin slices 
of all the variously built materials or tisswes of which the 
plant consists. Living plants must be studied in order 
to ascertain what kinds of food they take, what kinds of 
waste substances they excrete, how and where their growth 
takes place and what circumstances favor it, how they 
move, and indeed to get as complete an idea as possible 
of what has been called the behavior of plants. 
Since the most familar and most interesting plants 
spring from seeds, the beginner in botany can hardly do 
