also be useful to the
beginner who wishes to approach botany from its most attractive
side--that of the development of the creature from the seed to seed.

There is another kind of training which every beginner in the art of
observing Nature should obtain, and which many naturalists of repute
would do well to give themselves--namely, an education in what we may
call the art of distance and geographical forms. With the primitive
savage the capacity to remember and to picture to the eye the shape of
a country which he knows is native and instinctive. Accustomed to
range the woods, and to trust to his recollection to guide him through
the wilderness to his home, the primitive man develops an important
art which among civilized people is generally dormant. In fact, in our
well-trodden ways people may go for many generations without ever
being called upon to use this natural sense of geography. The easiest
way to cultivate the geographic sense is by practising the art of
making sketch maps. This the student, however untrained, can readily
do by taking first his own dwelling house, on which he should practise
until he can readily from memory make a tolerably correct and
proportional plan of all its rooms. Then on a smaller scale he should
begin to make also from recollection a map showing the distribution of
the roads, streams, and hills with which his daily life makes him
familiar. From time to time this work from memory should be compared
with the facts. At first the record will be found to be very poor, but
with a few months of occasional endeavour the observer will find that
his mind takes account of geographic features in a way it did not
before, and, moreover, that his mind becomes enriched with
impressions of the country which are clear and distinct, in place of
the shadowy recollections which he at first possessed.

When the student has attained the point where, after walking or riding
over a country, he can readily recall its physical features of the
simpler sort, he will find it profitable to undertake the method of
mapping with contour lines--that is, by pencilling in indications to
show the exact shape of the elevations and depressions. The principle
of contour lines is that each of them represents where water would
come against the slope if the area were sunk step by step below the
sea level--in other words, each contour line marks the intersection of
a horizontal plane with the elevation of the country. Practi