An Argument for Morphology. 
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AN ARGUMENT FOR MORPHOLOGY. 
Bv M. C. Stopes. 
G RANTED that Morphology is the dry bones of the science 
of Botany— One does not teach a child to walk or run till 
the bones of its legs are firm. 
Students come to their teachers full of the hazy golden dreams 
of youth, dreams which are most easily transmuted into theories, 
theories audaciously ready to deal with complex and difficult 
phenomena. Only too readily do theories flourish on but hazily 
comprehended facts, and the only way even partly to counteract the 
inherent laziness and sloppiness of the human brain is to train it, 
while it is still plastic, to deal so far as possible exactly with 
observable phenomena. To do this (in Botany) the external and 
microscopic morphology and anatomy of plants is the medium for 
illustration most available for the overburdened teacher of 
elementary botany. In this study exactitude of observation can 
be attained without elaborate apparatus, and it can be obtained 
without the need of “correcting” for all sorts of unknown 
factors. To cut sections of and draw the cells accurately of definite 
portions of plant tissue is a sterner mental training, and, because it 
gives a useful realisation of the essential construction of a plant’s 
body, is a better mental foundation than any amount of “ cross 
breeding ” or measurements of transpiration by one who has no 
exact picture of the tissues he is dealing with. Never shall I forget 
the ridiculous spectacle an advanced English student who had been 
only “physiologically” trained, made in a seminar of a German 
University when he insistently advocated wonderful theories of 
his own about the flow of water. It was patent to everyone who 
heard him and knew the mechanism of the plant’s body, that the 
man hadn’t the ghost of an idea of the distribution of essential 
tissues. 
With early youth the mind loses any power it ever had of 
dealing accurately with phenomena, unless in youth it has been 
given a precisely accurate bent. Later on, if once this rectitude 
has been established, the mind can be trusted to play on bigger and 
vaguer or more complex themes. Whatever the after work on 
plants, an accurate mental picture of the essentials of their organs 
