A Botanical Curriculum. 
123 
All details of descriptive botany, comparatively dry and 
unenlightening to the beginner, should he rigidly avoided, not only 
with young children hut also in schools. Drudgery of this 
description tends only to disgust the child with the whole subject. 
The story told by Dr. Kimmins at the discussion on the Teaching 
of Botany, at last year's British Association, one may hope related 
to an exceptional case, but the method it illustrates is wholly 
vicious. Mites of seven or eight were found by an inspector 
writing down the whorls of a flower as gamopetalous, polyandrous, 
etc. “But do you suppose they understand in the least what these 
words mean,” asked the inspector, “ do they know any Greek ? ” 
“ Well, no,” said the mistress, “ but then, you see how useful it 
would he if they should ever want to learn it!” There is the less 
excuse for this sort of thing nowadays, on the ground of the 
tyranny of the examination, as the recent Cambridge Junior Local 
papers have been set on remarkably broad and rational lines, the 
questions being such as would test a real first hand elementary 
knowledge of the factors which govern the life of a plant. 
Children can be taught to look at flowers and understand a lot 
about them, and yet be burdened with scarcely any names. The 
biological side of the flower can always be kept in the foreground. 
The functions of the different whorls are all directly demonstrable 
by observations which could hardly fail to interest an intelligent 
boy or girl. The visits of insects can be watched in the garden or 
in the open country and with a very little patience many of the 
facts on which the biological “ theory of flowers ” is based can be 
made out at first-hand. The gradual swelling of the carpels after 
fertilization, and the ripening of the different kinds of fruits is just 
as interesting and as easily followed. 
To turn to quite another branch of the subject, the facts 
connected with the universal distribution of bacteria and fungal 
spores, with the growth of these on various nutrient substances, and 
with their exclusion by sterilisation, might form the subject of a 
series of easily-conducted experiments, which, for some minds 
among the pupils of a school, have quite a peculiar fascination. 
Only a few of the principal subjects that lend themselves to the 
sort of teaching indicated—a teaching in which the children should 
be made to do and see everything for themselves, the teacher giving 
but a few hints here and there—have been touched upon. 1 And yet 
1 We hope shortly to be able to publish an article by a high-scliool 
mistress who has had considerable experience and great success 
in this kind of teaching, describing her actual methods and 
their results. 
