PREFACE. 
9 
A. Most decidedly. It was also the opinion of some of the 
inspectors of schools, who came to visit him, that such children 
were in general more intelligent than those of other parishes; 
and they attribute the difference to their observant and reason¬ 
ing faculties being thus developed. . . . 
Q. So that the intellectual success of this objective study 
was beyond question ? 
A. Beyond question. ... In conducting the examinations 
of medical men for the army, which I have now conducted for 
several years, and those for the East India Company’s service, 
which I have conducted for, I think, seven years, the questions 
which I am in the habit of putting, and which are not answered 
by the majority of the candidates, are what would have been 
answered by the children in Prof. Henslovv’s village-school. I 
believe the chief reason to be, that these students’ observing 
faculties, as children, had never been trained—such faculties 
having lain dormant with those who naturally possessed them 
in a high degree; and having never been developed, by train¬ 
ing, in those who possessed them in a low degree. In most 
medical schools, the whole sum and substance of botanical 
« 
science is crammed into a few weeks of lectures, and the men 
leave the class without having acquired an accurate knowledge 
of the merest elements of the science. . . . 
The printed form or schedule contrived by Prof. 
Henslow, and used in these classes, applied only to 
the flower, the most complex part of the plant, and 
the attention of children was directed by it chiefly to 
those features upon which orders depend in classifica¬ 
tion. But, instead of confining its use to the study 
of the flower, it seemed to me to be equally useful in 
the whole course of Descriptive Botany. I accord¬ 
ingly prepared a simplified series of exercises on this 
plan, and used them to guide some little children in 
