18 FLORA INDICA. 



tiny of a few of the points under a microscope, he has made 

 real progress as an observer. This, we maintain, is no more 

 botany, than performing chemical experiments is chemistry, or 

 star-gazing, astronomy. A sound elementary knowledge of 

 vegetable physiology is essential to the naturalist, and should 

 indeed be a branch of general education, as it requires nothing 

 but fair powers of observation and an ordinary memory to ac- 

 quire it. For the student to confine his attention to this 

 knowledge of the vegetable world, and to try and improve 

 upon it by crude experiments of his own, undertaken in igno- 

 rance of the branches of pure botany we have enumerated, is a 

 very rational amusement, but nothing more. 



A review of the progress of the science in England during 

 the last fifty years, proves indisputably, that more botanists 

 were made by the thorough grounding in classification to 

 which all students were formerly subjected, than by the pre- 

 sent method of commencing instruction with anatomy and 

 physiology, organic chemistry, the use of compound micro- 

 scopes, and similar abstruse subjects, which are mysteries to 

 the majority of students. The latter are indeed, in too many 

 cases, perfectly ignorant of the elements of natural science, 

 and require some practical acquaintance with plants and their 

 organs, before they can appreciate the relations of the different 

 branches of botany to one another, or discriminate between 

 what it is essential to understand first, and what is better 

 acquired afterwards. Were the elements of science taught at 

 schools, this would not be so : we should then have the stu- 

 dent presenting himself at the botanical lectures fully prepared 

 for the more difBcidt branches of the science, and for making 

 that progress in them for which the professor's aid is indis- 

 pensable. A sound practical knowledge of system we hold to 

 be an essential preliminary to the study of the physiology of 



plication of the Natural System, as illiistrated by medicinal plants and their 

 properties. The botanical class would not then be considered, as it now vmi- 

 versally is, as time thrown away, and an interference with the legitimate studies 

 of the medical student, — an opinion also shared by many of the professors. 



