first, merely because it is more showy. The sensuous pleasure derived from its contemplation is superficial as compared with the deeper intellectual pleasure of tracing the scientific relations of the leaf.
5. Finally, it is an axiom that can not be disputed, that mental effort should advance from the simple subject to the more complex. The leaf is much simpler than the flower, and is therefore much better suited for beginning the study of botany.
To consider these propositions in order: 1 and 2. In regard to the first I am substantially in entire agreement with Miss Youmans, as indeed is shown by the examples given in the "Experiment." No attempt was made to really study the physiology of plants; while the external and obvious characters of the most conspicuous portions, the parts, namely, of the flower, were studied, or rather submitted to a prolonged contemplation. Only, upon first crossing the threshold of this new world, the most characteristic facts which distinguished it were pointed out in a manner designed to make as profound an impression as possible upon the imagination. These are the facts of life and growth and death, the germination of the seed, the influence of surrounding media, the circumstance that the plant offers a constant succession of changing phenomena, and thus was an entirely different object from a stone, or a mathematical figure, or a rainbow. Now, while it is perfectly true that the term "evolution" and the vast series of ideas and masses of facts suggested by it can not be rendered comprehensible to a child, and that it would be the grossest pedantry to even mention it to him, yet the great fact of growth and incessant change in living organisms is perfectly appreciable through impressions made on his senses, and is well fitted to arouse in him a lively interest and curiosity. The fact of life—the essential nature of life as a series of incessant changes—is perhaps the most fundamental fact with which the mind will ever become acquainted. It is also among the most primitive and earliest encountered; the mode of impression it makes upon the mind permanently stamps all the thoughts and systems of thought the mind ever entertains. For, whence spring all religions, and cosmogonies, and even ethical systems, but from the primitive thoughts held upon life and death? How many immoralities depend upon false estimates of life, of its nature, its values! How many erroneous theories of life might be corrected by the early habit of direct, unbiased observation of living things! In the building of a brain, the earliest ideas always remain the most powerful, because upon them the entire mental structure is destined to repose; or, since the mind is a living organism, it were better to compare its primitive ideas, not to the foundation-stones of a house, but to the central medullary rings of a tree. What is on the surface while the plant is young soon becomes central by the successive superposition of new impressions, the new circles being constantly intersected by rays prolonged from the central pith. The selection of the earliest ideas and impressions is therefore of the
