preliminary work, digesting his observations, and making the facts bis own, until he becomes intelligent in regard to the common varieties of plant-forms and structures. It is because the text-books of botany hitherto in use fail to provide for and to enforce this thoroughness of introductory study of the characters of plants—fail in the very groundwork of the subject—that the present plan of study has been prepared."
Miss Youmans's books, therefore, bear the same relation to the vegetable kingdom that an art-gallery "guide" bears to a collection of pictures: in connection with them it is valuable and important; apart from them, of little use. To those who wish to read botany, or to acquire it by the usual method of lesson-learning, her books will be of small service; but, to such as desire to know the science itself in its facts and principles at first hand, and to become so intelligent in regard to vegetable forms that they can read them as they walk in the fields, like printed pages, the method of study that she has arranged will be invaluable. The object that she wishes to secure being mainly educational—the cultivation of independent observation and reason, as applied to objects of experience she insists that the study must be commenced early, while the childish mind is in its perceptive stage and peculiarly alive to external things. The First Book is therefore adapted to young children and beginners, and deals only with those readily-observed characters of plants which can be examined with the naked eye. The Second Book begins where the First left off, and goes more thoroughly into the work; the use of magnifying-glasses and microscopes is now commenced, and observation becomes careful and complete. The schedule system is carried out in its application to the flower, and "the pupil is introduced to the leading principles by which plants are arranged, and set to making groups of those that most nearly resemble each other in important characters. He is here called upon to do his own thinking, and to form opinions as to the amount of resemblance between different plants. He has to decide whether a certain group of characters presented by this specimen is most like one or another group presented by other plants, and this leads on to the comparison and estimate of the relations of different groups with each other. It is thus that the discipline of the judgment and reason begins to be secured at an early stage of the study, and is continued with more and more completeness as it goes on."
A great deal is said by thoughtful educators about the need of the more direct and thorough study of Nature, but the difficulty has hitherto been, how to make it generally possible and practicable. These little Books of Botany show how it may be done, and provide for the doing of it. "They are guides to self-education, and are adapted for use in school or out, by teachers and mothers, whether they know any thing of the subject or not, and by pupils without any assistance at all." They set the pupil to work, guide him in his course, and bring him face to face continually with difficulties which it will require the exercise of independent judgment to deal with. Mistakes will of course be made, and effort will be necessary to correct them, but this is the sole condition on which the judgment of things is to be educated. The value of the study of natural history classifications as a means of higher mental discipline—not in books, but in the objects themselves which illustrate them—has been long recognized, and botany unquestionably affords the best facilities for obtaining it. Upon this point Miss Youmans remarks: "Its discipline is corrective of the most common defects of education, and is eminently applicable in forming judgments upon the ordinary affairs of life. Carelessness in observation, looseness in the application of words, hasty inferences from partial data, and lack of method in the contents of the mind, are common faults even among the cultivated, and it is precisely these faults that the study of botanical science, by the method here proposed, is calculated to remedy. That the habit of systematic arrangement, in which the study of botanical classification affords so admirable a training, is equally valuable in methodizing all the results of thought, is testified to by one of the most intellectual and influential men of our time, Mr.John Stuart Mill. He was a regular field botanist, and cultivated the subject with a view to its important mental advan-
