cultivation. Examination of the curve will suggest interesting problems to anyone who is interested. It is possible that breeding experiments may be instituted on the school grounds next year, selecting for planting such heads as have a number of grains corresponding to one of the several maxima in variety B-eighty-one to eighty-five grains for instance. Such experiments as these could not fail to arouse interest among the pupils of succeeding years. The frequency table and curves are appended. As noted above, these are the combined results including two hundred heads of each variety. HIGH SCHOOL OR COLLEGE BOTANY, WHICH? BY WILLARD N. CLUTE, Curtis High School, Chicago. Those most interested in the presentation of botany in the high school are often heard to complain that the subject is not taught as well as it might be, but it is seldom that any attempt is made to give a reason for the ineffectual way in which it is handled. We realize that something is wrong without being able to suggest a cure. Possibly several factors influence the result among which we may at once name poorly equipped laboratories, inadequate material, unsatisfactory text-books, and inefficient teachers--but it seems to me that the most important factor is found in the way in which we confuse the botany of the high school with that of the college and university. At first glance it may seem absurd to insist that there are two phases of the subject and that one is more appropriate for presenting in the high school than the other, but a little thought must show, since the aims of college and high school are somewhat different and the attitude of their respective students decidedly so, that if there are not two phases there certainly ought to be. The college student is primarily after knowledge and wishes to get it by the most direct method possible. His teacher, therefore, does much of the reciting, though we commonly call the recitations lectures, and illustrates his remarks by specimens, photographs, drawings, and lantern slides. Such a course is, in fact, largely a distribution of information. The instructor attempts to cover completely any subject upon which he may touch, assigns much outside reading, exacts a careful study of the text book in the laboratory, and requires the notebook to be a repository of facts gleaned by the student. The high school teacher, on the other hand, is not especially concerned in developing botanists. With him the first effort is to inculcate the scientific attitude and to make his pupil a seeing, investigating, and reasoning being a credit to his teacher and a joy to the college that may later attract him. Nor is the raw material out of which such paragons are to be made very strongly inclined toward botanical knowledge. It consists of students who will learn things botanical if they must, but who much prefer to play. It is rare that any large number⚫ elect botany because of a love for the study. The prospective field trips allure some, others take the study because a chum does so, or because it looks easy, or because a credit in science is needed for graduation. Such students may be drilled into exhibiting no signs of restlessness under the college method of presenting botany, but they rarely work up much interest or enthusiasm for it. It is no kindness to the high school pupil to recite his botanical lessons for him, no matter how delightfully illustrated they may be by lantern and microscope. Indeed, such methods may be termed the worst possible, since it takes from the pupil the joy of discovery and thereby lessens that interest in the study upon which every good teacher rightly depends for carrying the class successfully through the course. What the high school student needs is not to be told about the subject, but to be given a set of fairly searching questions and proper materials and directed to get his answers for himself. A laboratory manual that tells the pupil what he is to see, is about as much out of date as the old botanical course that consisted mainly in "analyzing" flowers. And the text-book should be rigidly excluded from the laboratory for the same reason that the college professor should be because it tells too much. We wish the student to find out for himself. For be it remembered that the use of botany in the high school is primarily to give him power, rather than to fill him up with information. It is not essential that every phase of botany touched upon in the high school course be exhaustively studied and little assigned reading is necessary. The time used in reading about things may be more profitably used in studying the things themselves. Nor is the notebook here a mere storehouse of facts. It should be a carefully written account of what the pupil has worked out for himself. Poor teaching has spoiled more good students than lack of knowledge. The college-made instructor, whose claim to be able to teach botany rests mainly upon the fact that he has taken a botanical course, often adds to the confusion of the subject by attempting to give the pupils entrusted to him a dilute and weak imitation of the college course, forgetting altogether to consider their special needs. If botany is ever to take its rightful place in the list of high school studies, there ought to be a place somewhere where the college-fed person may be taught how to teach. Anybody can ask questions that require only the knowledge gleaned from the books to answer, but it takes little short of genius to ask questions that shall drill the pupil in expressing the results of his own thought or indeed to make him think at all. The college-bred teacher is likely to be further hampered by a text-book written by a college man with no high school experience and no more idea of what high school pupils require than a Hottentot. The very language used needs an interpreter. The substance of the course may not be over the heads of the pupils, but the language certainly is. The writers of books instinctively fall into the habit of using words derived from the Latin and signally fail to perceive that the child's vocabulary consists largely of shorter words derived from the Anglo-Saxon. As to the substance of the course, it is probable that we shall never have an entirely satisfactory book until college man and high school man collaborate in producing it. Without doubt the college method of presenting botany is best for the college, but it is here contended that it is not desirable for the high school because of the different results aimed at. If it be concluded that the first function of the teacher in the high school is the furnishing of information, then the college method is probably the better, but otherwise it is not, since the high school usually aims at giving power as well as knowledge through this study. Teachers who have difficulty in making botany attractive to their students, may find that the trouble lies entirely in this failure to distinguish between two phases of the subject. Under such conditions, the other phase ought to be given a trial at least, keeping in mind the viewpoint of the child and the things that interest him. THE LOCUS PROBLEM IN GEOMETRY WITH SOME DIS- According to my experience and observation the most profitable feature of meetings like these is the interchange by teachers of actual class room experience. It is an advantage to know the methods of fellow teachers, whether we see fit to follow them or not. Let me then begin the present discussion by a statement of how I treat the matter in hand in the class room, and follow this statement by some general observations on the larger bearings of the question under consideration. The term "locus," when first mentioned, is apt to repel the pupil by its strangeness and abstractness. In the space of a few weeks after beginning the study of geometry the pupil is introduced to a large number of new terms and ideas, and at the mention of this additional term with a stranger name than any that precedes it the pupil is apt to get discouraged and want to quit. Hence it is my habit to introduce the topic in hand with considerable explanation, using the word "path" instead of "locus." Thus I say, "If a point moves so as always to be three inches from a given fixed point, what will its path be or in what path will it move?" So of a point moving so as to be always two inches from a given straight line, etc. On the other hand the loci naturally arising in Book I are so simple and obvious as not to justify in the pupil's mind the effort necessary to master this new concept; hence it seems desirable at the outset to introduce broader illustrations than those supplied by Book I. Thus we can make a natural transition to the conic sections by asking first what will be the path of a point moving so as to be equidistant from two points; or then from two lines; and then from a point and a line, thus introducing the parabola. Boys of course are always much interested in learning that a projectile, as the baseball every time it is thrown, or the football every time it is kicked, moves approximately in the arc of a parabola, a curve determined in the simple way just mentioned. Similarly I call the attention of classes to the ellipse as the path of a point the sum of whose distances from two fixed points is the same and hence being Read before the Philadelphia Section of the Association of Teachers of Mathematics the Middle States and Maryland, May, 1910. |