THE AMERICAN BOTANIST 



37 



in plants instead of producing a distaste for further study as 

 soon as examinations are safely passed. The lives of most of 

 us are spent surrounded by plants and every intelligent person 

 ought to be interested in them. 



Hi * 



There seem to be several reasons why the usual high 

 school course in botany does not give a better account of itself, 

 but the two most important reasons are undoubtedly the high 

 school board and the teacher. Boards of education still class 

 bo'tany with chemistry and physics and assume that if one can 

 be taught successfully in a class room the others can be. When 

 they have supplied a botanical laboratory with plenty of glass- 

 ware, microscopes, section-cutters, and staining media, they 

 feel that they have properly equipped the school for the study 

 of plants. It never enters the heads of school directors that 

 plants are really alive and to be of much interest to^ young 

 students must be studied in the living state out of doors. 

 People flock to our botanical gardens and public conservatories, 

 but they seldom become excited over jars of pickled specimens 

 or the remains of plants stuck to herbarium sheets. 



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The teacher of botany seems even more to blame than the 

 school board. As a general thing he is teaching botany because 

 there is nobody else to conduct the course. Knowing little 

 about the subject he is totally unable to induce the school board 

 to grant him better conditions. The botanical course still con- 

 sists, in too many cases, of recitations on the terms used in 

 systematic botany, followed by the pressing of a definite num- 

 ber of plant tops, identified by looking up the common names in 

 the index to the "Manual." Is it any wonder that the student 

 gets little inspiration from such study for further investiga- 

 tions? There are at least ten thousand teachers of botany in 

 this country, but not a tenth of them subscribe for, or read, the 

 botanical publications. And if they read any botanical book 

 except the text used with the class, it is almost certainly a book 



