BOOKWORK AND EXAMINATION SCHEMES 389 
The following undated letter to Henslow further illustrates 
his difficulties : 
Better not recommend hooks except perhaps to advise 
the study of such a thing as Lindley's Is. pamphlet on 
descriptive Botany, which is quite unique, and I think the 
men should be told that it is best to work upon the Candollean 
system of Orders. I should not recommend any other of 
Lindley's works, or indeed any works as works : and the Is. 
pamphlet only as indicating a method of working that will 
certainly meet the exigencies of the Examiners. 
I find yearly the difficulty of having to do with men 
w^ho have never been taught on any system, or all on different 
systems. I feel the difficulty of recommending books, but I 
see in the present condition of the Science and its Professors, 
the necessity of indicating a method both of working and of 
arranging the Nat. Ords. To make the hook work depend 
on the coaching up a particular author's work, as Babington ^ 
proposes to do by Lindley's Elements, would be fatal to any 
good examination. 
The proper method of examination is further dealt with 
in a letter to Harvey, who had just been appointed Moderator 
in the College examinations at Dublin. 
[March 24, 1857.] What is a Moderator-ship ? Steam or 
sail ? I like your programme of it, but do, I beg, insist on their 
demonstrating characters both on dried and living specimens 
of Brit, polypet [alae] and see that their knowledge is founded 
on sound Morphological laws, as studied by themselves on , 
the plants. Henslow has just issued an admirable dried iplant 
Examination Scheme, write and ask him. You are quite 
right to stick to elementary knowledge of British plants, 
and however much you change your subject never lose 
sight of the principle of keeping within the limit of what 
^ Charles Cardale Babington (1808-95), botanist and archseologist, who 
succeeded Henslow as Professor of Botany at Cambridge in 1861, was especially 
enthusiastic as a field botanist, and his Manual of British Botany in successive 
editions from 1843 onwards brought the subject from the Linnean stage into 
harmony with continental progress in systematic and descriptive botany. 
His lectures, however, did not expand with the new developments of botanic 
teaching in histology and physiology, and his detailed descriptive work, such 
as the Synopsis of British Ruhi, ran to an extreme of analysis in basing new 
species in minute difEerences. 
VOL. I 2 
