Excerpt from Botany All the Year Round: A Practical Text-Book for Schools Most of the recent text-books of botany, excellent as many of them are, fail to meet the conditions of the average public school, where expensive laboratory appliances are out of the question, and time to make a proper use of them is equally unattainable. It is one of the anomalies of our educational system that the study of plants, if provided for at all, should be confined mainly to city schools, where it is necessarily carried on under disadvantageous conditions, while it is almost entirely neglected in the country, where the great laboratory of nature stands invitingly open at every schoolhouse door. The writer believes that this neglect is largely due to the want of a text-book suited to general use, in which the subject is treated in a manner at once simple, practical, and scientific. It is with a desire to meet this need and to encourage a more general adoption of botanical studies in the public schools that the present work has been undertaken. It aims, in the first place, to lead the pupil to nature for the objects of each lesson; and in the second place, to provide that the proper material shall be always available by so arranging the lessons that each subject will be taken up at just the time of the year when the material for it is most abundant. In this way the study can be carried on all the year round, a plan which will be found much better than crowding the whole course into a few weeks of the spring term. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.