A Botanical Curriculum. 
1 7 1 
attention can hardly be given to making the course vital and 
stimulating. It is by far the most important part of the student’s 
curriculum. The effect it has on his mind may determine not 
only the particular course of his future career, but the whole 
mental effect of his scientific training. His mind may never recover 
from the deadening effect of dull and pedantic elementary 
teaching, or if it does recover, it will he much later, and at the 
cost of a terrible waste of time and mental energy. 
With the actual material of the course, we need not deal. 
It must be largely the same in all cases, but different teachers will 
naturally modify it in accordance with their own idiosyncracies. 
It need hardly be said that the main thing is to keep the living 
plant constantly before the mind of the student; the plant as a 
being, with its immediate vital needs on the one hand, and its long 
evolutionary history on the other—a history worked out by means 
of constant adjustments of its structure and functions to these 
needs in the changing conditions of life. 
It should be insisted that the student entering upon his 
botanical work should understand the elements of chemistry and 
physics. In an ideally organized University the student of science 
should go through elementary courses of chemistry and physics in 
his first year after matriculation, and of two other subjects, of 
which botany may be one, in his second. He ought not to be 
called upon to give his attention to more than two subjects during 
the same year. In this way ample time would be left for more or 
less independent work in the laboratory or field work, which the 
keener students, should be encouraged to pursue, and for which 
they should be given ample facilities. This work should not be at 
all formal: the student should be allowed to do just what he likes, 
and any suggestions or help that he may want should be forth¬ 
coming from his demonstrators. Under the present system, in 
which far too much work is crowded into a year, there is always a 
certain number of students who want to go further into various 
topics which arise ; but it is usually impossible, owing to the pres¬ 
sure of other subjects. On the other hand, students who have no 
desire for this supplementary work should not be worried to do 
it. They will be far better employed in games or other recreation. 
The reading of text-books is, we believe, on the whole undesir¬ 
able for properly taught elementary students. Such information as 
a student desires over and above what he is taught or can find out 
from the plants themselves should be given by his demonstrator. 
