Chapters in modern botany / by Patrick Geddes.

  • Geddes, Patrick, Sir, 1854-1932.
Date:
1899
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Chapters in modern botany / by Patrick Geddes. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    PREFACE This little book makes no attempt to condense a survey of its science; even within the fields through which it passes it seeks only to be suggestive, not exhaustive; its chapters have actually grown out of the syllabus and notes of University Extension Lectures, with their neces- sary limitations. In matter and form its appeal is to the general reader; yet, in method and spirit, to the student also,—in some measure even to the teacher. In botany, as in other studies, educational methods alter with the times. In the Linnean period the best botanist was he who knew the most plants, however little of each; while a later and still dominant school has founded upon Cuvier a type-system which makes him know much,—but of few. Hence the student has come no longer to load his vasculum and memory in a single vacation with all things from the cedar to the hyssop; but, seeing that cedar and hyssop have been selected as types by the highest authority, scrutinises these, and these only, for his term. Analysis is great, and the anatomist is its prophet j'-yet such Elementary Biology is but Necrology, its so-called life-histories being but histories of form. It is the misfortune of biology that Darwin was not a teacher. It is no easy matter for us professors, trained from our youth in Linnean or Cuvierian schools, to