Frederic E. Clements 
196 
such as might arise from the season. For the sake of perspective it 
is desirable to sketch the work for the entire year, or for a term at 
the least, but it is best to determine the details project by project, 
as this enables the student to bring increasing knowledge and insight 
to the task. Finally, it must be realized that the outline thus obtained 
is a guide and not a mould, and that it is to be changed or modified 
as the developing interests of the class demand. In this connection 
emphasis should perhaps be given to the fact that by interests are 
understood those motives that impel the student to work and think 
rather than to gratify a passing curiosity. 
While each region or locality may have its peculiar contacts or 
interests, all the beginning classes handled in this manner have been 
practically unanimous as to the most important things to include 
in the course. The things that plants do have proved much more 
compelling than what they are, and the student thus finds form and 
structure invested with a meaning to be gained in no other way. It 
is impossible to work with processes in plants without growing them, 
and this leads inevitably to their uses, patently the two oldest and 
most basic human contacts with plants. It is quickly realized that 
plants can be handled more readily and certainly when they have 
names, and this furnishes a convincing reason for discovering the 
floral earmarks of families and learning to read the solution of the 
flowers problems of pollination and seed-production in its structure. 
It does not, however, constitute a warrant for the use of keys and 
manuals, which belong only in advanced classes. The contacts with 
the visible plant world prove so numerous that the microscope enters 
the course but exceptionally if at all, and only when it is needed to 
give reality, as in the case of pollen, for example. Furthermore, the 
students’ contacts with cultivated plants have been and will be 
much more numerous than with native ones, and the material of 
the course will be selected accordingly. Moreover, it will be disclosed 
that students do not need to be “taught” evolution, but that this 
is something they will discover for themselves in their work with 
flowers, with an understanding and insight entirely foreign to the 
traditional account. Finally, the out-doors is the world of students 
as well as of plants, and interest and results are enhanced to the 
degree that the work is done in garden and field, or the substitute 
that winter demands, the plant-house. 
Since the student organises his work and does it independently, 
the laboratory is the seat of the entire work of the course. But it 
is a new laboratory—one close to the primitive meaning of the word. 
