1876.] University Instruction in Botany. 289 
on eryptogams or vegetable physiology, but the great fact is 
never lost sight of that the aim and end of all botanical instruction 
is, at the end of a year’s study, to be able to take one’s manual, 
and, with a certain degree of facility, find the names of common 
flowering plants. That is the first task to be accomplished, and 
not until it is accomplished is any student to be allowed to take 
upanything else. As a matter of fact; comparatively few students 
pursue the subject for a second year, if by the university regula- 
tions they are allowed to give it up; and the question suggests 
itself, What is the result of a botanical course of one year? The 
good students who have, under the circumstances, made the best 
possible use of their time, are able to analyze simple flowering 
plants with tolerable ease, and know the characters of some of 
the orders of pheenogams; and those who have not studied so 
faithfully are perhaps able to explain to a cruelly skeptical father 
that a rose-bush is very much like an apple-tree, or to compare 
notes with Emily, who has just returned from Miss Smith’s Insti- 
tution for Young Ladies, and, after some months’ study, is not 
quite sure whether the calyx is inside or outside the petals. 
We must confess that it seems to us a mistaken notion to teach 
botany as though the naming of phzenogams, or even the general 
morphology of phenogams, was any more important than other 
topics. We know from experience that but a very small per 
cent. of the students who study botany in college ever do learn 
enough to enable them to analyze flowers with any ease, and that 
even the few who can, rarely continue the study after leaving 
college, from want of either time or opportunity for herboriz- 
ing. The botanical students in any university may be divided 
into three classes: those who have a passion, a natural aptitude, 
for the Subject, whose number is always very small, and includes 
those who are to become the experts and higher teachers of 
botany ; those of good ability and industry, who elect botany 
because they hope to find it an aid afterwards when they shall 
study a profession or become school-teachers; and those who 
select the study as part of a plan of general culture and im- 
provement. . There is a fourth class, but we never mention that, 
Composed of young gentlemen whose principal aim in coming to 
college seems to be to get as little good out of it as possible. We 
should like to know which of these three classes is benefited by 
the almost exclusive study of phanogams for the first and, in the 
Case of many of them, the only year of their botanical studies. 
ose who wish for general culture get a smattering of the tech- 
NO. 5. 19 
nie Pe 
