Excerpt from Outlines of Botany: For the High School Laboratory and Classroom (Based on Gray's Lessons in Botany) The present text-book has been prepared to meet a specific demand. There are many schools which, having outgrown certain now antiquated methods of teaching botany, find the best of the more recent text-books too difficult and comprehensive for practical use in an elementary course. The large number of subjects included in the modern high school course necessarily confines within narrow time limits the attention which can be devoted to any one branch. Thus, more than ever before, a careful selection and judicious arrangement as well as great simplicity and definiteness in presentation are all requisite to the practical success of any one course of study. This book offers (1) a series of laboratory exercises in the morphology and physiology of phanerogams, (2) directions for a practicable study of typical cryptogams, representing the chief groups from the lowest to the highest, and (3) a substantial body of information regarding the forms, activities, and relationships of plants and supplementing the laboratory studies. The practical exercises and experiments have been so chosen that schools with compound microscopes and expensive laboratory apparatus may have ample opportunity to employ to advantage their superior equipment. On the other hand, the needs of less fortunate schools, which possess as yet only simple microscopes and very limited apparatus, have been constantly borne in mind. Even when the cryptogams and certain anatomical features of the phauerogams are to lie dealt with, much may be accomplished with the hand lens, and, where applicable at all, it is in an elementary course usually a better aid to clear comprehension of objects examined than the compound microscope. Furthermore, the experiments covering the fundamental principles of plant physiology have been so far as possible arranged in such a manner as to require only simple appliances. In arranging a scientific text-book it has been a common practice to interpolate directions for observation and experiment in the body of the text. In teaching, however, the writer has found this arrangement highly objectionable. Both laboratory work and class-room exercises suffer from it. Accordingly, in this book instructions for laboratory study are placed in divisions by themselves, preceding the related chapters of descriptive text. The pupil with his book open before him in the laboratory will, therefore, not here be confronted by pictures and statements constituting keys to the work which he should carry out independently. Although it is not intended that each laboratory chapter should of necessity be finished before the following chapter of text is taken up, the examination of the plants themselves should naturally be kept somewhat in advance of the recitations which summarize and complement the information gained from that study. 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.