Abstract
IN his far-reaching essay on “Education,” Mr. Herbert Spencer remarks: “In education the process of self-development should be encouraged to the uttermost. Children should be led to make their own investigations, and to draw their own inferences. They should be told as little as possible, and induced to discover as much as possible.” It is satisfactory to all who are concerned in the progress of science, to know that these sound principles of scientific instruction are being brought more within the region of practical education every day. The present volume is an addition to the steadily growing literature in which the principles referred to are applied. The young students, for whom the book is intended, are led to make their own observations; they are induced to study plants, rather than printed books, and thus to derive their knowledge at first hand from nature. The opening lesson in the book is typical of the fifty-three which follow it. The pupils are told to collect the twigs of various trees or shrubs and to compare them, noting various peculiarities. A single twig is then examined, and attention is directed to the arrangement of the buds and leaf-scars upon it. In the second lesson, twigs are compared with particular reference to buds and their relations to branches, and are grouped according to bud-arrangement. The structure of stems afterwards forms the subject of several lessons, and then the root, leaf, flower, fruit and seed are studied in succession, after which come lessons having for their object the elucidation of the structure and history of individual plants and trees. Much more attention is given to trees than is usual in books on botany. The book is hardly suitable for class use on this side of the Atlantic, but an English edition of it would be welcomed by many teachers of botany.
Lessons in Elementary Botany for Secondary Schools.
By Thomas H. Macbride. Pp. 233. (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1896.)
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Lessons in Elementary Botany for Secondary Schools. Nature 53, 388 (1896). https://doi.org/10.1038/053388a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/053388a0