satisfaction. It is the heart that sees more than the mind. To love nature is the first step in observing her. If a boy had to learn fishing as a task, what slow progress he would make; but as his heart is in it, how soon he becomes an adept.

"The eye sees quickly and easily those things in which we are interested. A man interested in horses sees every fine horse in the country he passes through; the dairyman the cows; the bee culturist the bees; the sheep grower the flocks, etc. And it is even said that the ladies require no effort to note the new bonnets and cloaks on the street. If one is a lover of birds or flowers, he easily sees birds or flowers everywhere. The fact is we all see and observe easily in the line of our business, our tasks, our desires."

I would not teach a beautiful, rhythmical recitation about the sturdy oak, its leaves and acorns, and then find, as I did in one city schoolroom, that not a child there had ever seen an oak leaf nor an acorn.

See the bird capturing insects for food; see the insects feeding on the plant which draws its nourishment from the ground under the influence of the beneficent sunshine. That is nature study,

and it covers ground that the individual sciences do not even touch.

Teach nature study by the natural, boy-and-girl method. That is the way John Burroughs, William Hamilton Gibson, and others got more than seventy-five per cent. of their knowledge of nature, and from that rough-and-ready natural method of acquiring it, they gained a full storehouse, from which each drew according to his own testimony, for all the rest of his life.

We should teach this nature study in this haphazard, natural unsystematic manner, just as things come to hand, or as we are able to plan for their coming to hand. With it and beyond it we should teach and study science, strict, accurate, scientific science.

I would give to every boy or girl as nearly as possible the same that the wide-awake child in the country has, or what Whittier calls the Knowledge never learned of schools." And on that solid foundation I would build the noble, valuable superstructure called science.

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I would have the boys and girls rush over to the apple tree, pick up handfuls of apples, putting some in pocket and munching the rest. That is nature study in the natural manner. I would have

those same boys and girls sit at the table and make cross sections and vertical slices of some of those apples, noting the structure, the relation of seeds, cases, pulp and epidermis. That is science, and a science not injured by previous "nature study."

I would have the young folks climb on the ledge, stand near the boulder, and have a general goodtime in fun and frolic. That is nature study. I would tell them a little of the history of this ledge, its relations to the surrounding country, its geological structure and perhaps its chemical composition. That is science.

Enjoy the beautiful moonlight; note the bright stars and planets, and construct the fanciful pictures of the constellation. That is nature study. Tell of the surface of that moon, the distance of the stars, the various physical characters of the planets. That is science.

CHAPTER X

"WHAT DID YOU GET?”

"We are indebted," says a writer in "Science Gossip," "to the humorous pencil of Leach for a sketch of a languid gentleman, who, pining for a new sensation, is trying the effect of riding up and down the Strand, seated on the roof of an omnibus and picking out periwinkles with a pin. Should you ever feel as though you had exhausted all the resources of the civilized portions of the globe, do not seek for distraction in boiled cockles or in pickled whelks, but go away to the top of a hill, with woods and streams, and smiling fields dotted with farmsteads and villages spread before your feet, and there rest in solitude and wait on Nature, and listen and watch for all that her offspring will do above, below and around you, while the teeming planet turns once around its axis. Then seek a similar communion with the sea; study it from even-fall to broad daylight from the top of some lone, unfrequented cliff; or better still, commit yourself to the heaving bosom of the great waters,

and unless your soul be blind and deaf, you shall learn things never before dreamed of in your philosophy."

"What did you get?" Castellar tells you:

"Oh, Nature; immovable in the midst of movement, unique amid variety, surrounded with ether which penetrates every pore, forming the spirit and its atmosphere, with the continual succession of organic beings which change and are transformed. Oh Nature! durable and unchangeable; subject to death and to eternity; to the limited and the infinite; diffused over the immensity of space and compressed into organic beings from the stars which irradiate the heavens to the flowers which perfume the air with their aroma; from the unspeakable gases that evaporate, to the great mountain chains with their glaciers, where the snow whitens the volcanoes struggling with internal fires; from the almost imperceptible nebulæ, the great worlds which travel through space; from the grain of sand drifted by the wave, to the furthest stars of the Milky Way, whose light reaches us in twenty thousand centuries."

"What did you get?" Hear John Tyndall's

answer:

"The lilies of the field have a value for us be