University of California,
College of Agriculture
Berkeley, Nov. 27, 1880.
Prof. C. E. Bessey, Iowa Agr. College
My dear sir,
If I have been remiss in acknowledging
the receipt of your valuable volume on botany, you must attribute it to
the wretched condition of my eyes, the great pressure on my time, and
my unwillingness to respond in merely general terms. In view of the
"fundamental contradiction" [:] as Southern Presbyterian say: between
your method of presenting botany to the learner, and that of gray, as
modified in the opposite direction in the latest edition of his text book
I felt some hesitation in taking a stand on the question without mature
deliberation. Your book is certainly a most welcome, and much needed,
guide to teachers of botany, who are under the moral obligation to know
more on all subjects than they [expect] to teach, and who thus far had to
go for such information to costly books published in Europe, [and :so]
far as the most desirable are concerned: in foreign languages. It is
equally valuable for the use of the advanced student, who wants to know
more of plants than their names and morphology or rather, organography.
I wish there were more such. Yet when I reflect upon the number of those
in my classes who would have had time or disposition, in their hasty
rush for "an education", to master your book, I find them, few and far
between. I have faithfully tried to keep the classes interested in the
details of vegetable anatomy, and of microscopic life; but I have found
myself, year after year, dropping more and more into the view of gray, as
expressed in the last edition of my text book, that it is first of all
necessary to create the proper interest by explaining to the student
what he can see, before you can successfully talk to him about what he
cannot see, and must take on trust; or reason out by a process of logic
applied to facts, which our primary education leaves utterly undeveloped
except in the case of the kindergarten schools. I cannot bring myself
to leave out the subject of minute structure. Altogether, I think that
