Teaching the Names of Animals and Plants

Abstract

The idea seems to prevail in many places that the time spent in school in teaching the names of animals and plants is just so much time wasted. The proper botanical course, at least in my region, is pretty generally regarded as consisting of a half-year devoted to the gross structure and life-processes of seed-plants, followed by a half-year devoted chiefly to sporeplants and their evolution. It need hardly be said that, if adequate treatment is given these subjects in the periods allotted to them in the highschool course, little time will be left for teaching the names of plants. And yet, if I mistake not, the identification of plants is the only phase of botany in which the general public is interested; it is frequently the only part of botany in which the pupil is interested; and it is certainly the only branch of the subject that he follows up after he has left school. Doubtless every teacher has remarked the surprise of pupils when they discover that botany is not chiefly concerned with the names of plants. In any study, however, we cannot do much without knowing the names of the objects with which we deal. Possibly there would be a much larger percentage of the people permanently interested in botany if our school courses early took cognizance of the desire for the names of things. As it is, there are a great many persons in the position of the young lady who said she liked everything about flowers except botany. The number of people outside of school and college who are interested in systematic botany, at least to the extent of knowing the names of our common plants, is quite remarkable. We may gain some idea of it from the fact that more than sixty thousand copies of one popular guide to the wild flowers are said to have been sold in spite of a dozen or more competitors in the market. In view of these conditions, we may query whether it is not desirable to pay a bit more attention to the systematic side of botany than we have been doing. In my own opinion, any course of botany may well begin with a half-year devoted to the gross structure of seed-plants, but I am not so sure that the second half can invariably be devoted to the spore-plants with the best results for the student. The farmer, the gardener, the horticulturist, the woodsman--in fact, all of us who come in contact with plants, whether at our work or on vacation, want to know, first of all, the name, of the plants we encounter. The time has come, also, when a knowledgb of 463