A Textbook of Botany for Colleges (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from A Textbook of Botany for Colleges

This book is written in recognition of the fact that to nearly all college students an introductory course in Botany is part of a general education, and not a preparation for a professional botanical career. The distinction is important because our existent courses are largely adapted, even though unconsciously on our part, to the latter end. The needs in the two cases are not the same, though the difference is less in matter and method than in proportion and emphasis. All students alike need that personal contact with specific realities, and that exercise in verifiable reasoning, which laboratory courses render possible. Knowledge, however, is valuable to the specialist in the proportion to its objective importance, but to the general student in the accordance with its bearing on the actions and thoughts of mankind. In the one case the demands of the science are paramount and in the other the interests of the student.

This aim to provide for the general rather than the special student will explain certain characteristics of the book, - notably its emphasis upon the larger and more evident phenomena, its attention to the interpretation or " principle" of things, and its full consideration of man's relation to plants. Indeed, the book may be described as an attempt to present and interpret the humanly important aspects of plant nature in the light of our modern scientific knowledge. For the same reason the book is deliberately conservative, and adopts only such statements and views as have passed the test of wide criticism, and attained to the impersonal, and non-institutional, validity of science.

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