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Lansing Mich – 6-21-80
Dear Prof.,
Please take your daily [scheme?] of recitations, and mark what each Prof. does. Also your President: including all outside work and [Land?] to me. I wish to know each man's work number of classes, [Eli?].
We are all well.
[Yours?] Truly A. J. Cook
I wish you could [write?] us with your [wife?].
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Crawfordsville, [Sd] Aug. 24 80 Prof. C. E. Bessey: Dear Sir: I have received note fication of the mailing of your Botany from Holt Co., but have not received the book yet. I am well acquainted with it however through copies received at Cambridge during my recent visit[]. With very decided opinions regarding the study of physiological botany, you may be assured that I welcome this new departure. [As] exactly the thing I want. It goes this coming term, into my laboratory class in physiology [] greatly simplific, my work, for it saves some of the lecture drudgery. Some lecturing, of course, I will have to give, for what honest teacher does not?, but I can now give them to pupils whose knowledge has been based on your simplified physiology I imagine their attachments [will] be much more rapid satisfactory. My only criti cism is, that the two parts of the book do not seem to be belong together. Both are valuable, and the last one specifically unique, but they will never be wanted at the same time. My class will study the first part, but there is neither time or place for teh second and at the bulkier. Some of our courses are large enough to include 2 or 3 terms work in botany,
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but by the time we have dispersed of physiology, morphology systematic botany, what time have we left for economic? Not, of course, that I understand your 2 part to be devoted to Economic botany, but that part of it devoted to [Phaengenesis], could be best used in a course of lectures upon that department. Your treatment of the [cryptog...] in just what I have been wanting, for they have been too long neglected in our textbooks [..our] students often graduate with no knowledge of what a [crypto..] is if he depends upon the books placed in his hands. With regard is your raising the rank of some [cryptog..] groups I shall say nothing, for I am no judge in the matter. If it suits [cryptog] botanists, it will surely content me and I will teach it.
Please understand the [hearing] of my remarks. They do not condemn either part, for they are both excellent, the 2nd part being even more valuable than the first for it is more your own contribution, but I do think the bringing together an unhappy one. If the first part could be [bornes?] up alone I am confident it could be[fold] hundreds of times where the whole book will not be touched. Maybe I am mistaken, but I dislike to compel my boys to purchase a book, two thirds of which they are not required to use. Of course I am going to do it [and] am going to work into use more or leass of the second part, but probably I am more enthusiastic than
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most botanical professors, or at least have a much larger liberty in the matter of text books [and...] - Dr. Goodall said he would review your book in the Gazette over his own [pause?]. The copy has not come in yet, [and] I fear that it will not come, [ou..ing] to his many duties. In that case[] shall write one myself. Dr. Goodall expresses himself to me as being very well pleased with it. You are to be congratulated upon your success in giving us a lift from the mine. Can you not follow this up by [mone..] physiologial cover in the shape of notes to the Gazette? I am trying more [..] to switch it off in that direction, but physiol ogists either don't [..] to believe it don't want to contribute. I would like fully half of every Gazette to be devoted to physiology with the prospect of that being [..] sole [..] some day, for systematic work in more decidedly unproductive [and] the young botanists
