Teaching Plant Collecting in a Beginning Botany Course

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Many high school and college graduates with an interest in plants have recently found themselves thrust suddenly into the midst of an entirely new plant environment. At home they knew most of the common plants about them, as quackgrass, spring beauties, sugar maples, and many others, but in their new locations they cannot even say with certainty that the palm which shades them. as they write letters home is a coconut palm. As for the branching tree against which they lean their rifles-well, they may have heard of banyans and seen pictures of multitrunked trees, but that was just a queer idea pictured in their botany textbooks years ago. Encouragingly, many of these erstwhile youngsters have a gnawing curiosity about these strange plants around them, and are burning with a desire to know their names. But there is no one at hand to tell them, and, so far as they know, there is no one on earth who can help theni out. If they do happen to recall some beloved teacher whom they think might know, how are they to convey an idea of each of these objects of curiosity, so that they will be recognized? In school they were taught to examine cross sections of leaves and stems or watch the sap' rise in a white geranium set in a bottle of green ink. If they advanced a little farther, perhaps they learned how to identify flowers with a specially prepared local spring flora or even struggled about a bit with Gray's Manual. But all they learned in two or three courses will not help them to identify a Polynesian chestnut (Inocarpus edulis) or a Portia tree (Thespesia populnea). Their problem, however, is very simple if they only knew it-namely, to send a properly prepared herbarium specimen to any of several institutions in this country for identification. The reason they do not know this solution is doubtless because they have never seen herbarium specimens nor been shown their significance and use, and, what is more important, they have never learned to prepare them. And that is the subject of this paper. With the development around the beginning of this century of several new branches of botany, such as cytology, ecology, genetics, and the like, beginninig botany courses became crowded. The naming of plants and the making of individual student herbaria, which were usually ilncluded in beginning courses before that time, were now omittel. Taxonomy was relegated to a minor place toward the end of the course, and the students departed without even carrying away a notebook full of dried specimens to gather dust and insects in the attic at home. The college herbarium, if indeed there was one, came to be looked upon by the students, and even most faculty members, as a mixed haystack, where old fogies were busy digging for new species and the adjacent libraries were merely places where these round-shouldered abnormalities hunted for prior names to replace the long known designations of even our familiar plants. The complacency and busy