if you have none of the genuine article in your own heart; heart, not head.

We who would teach and inspire the young folks, must learn our own lesson before we try to instruct them. Otherwise the child will find our teaching as interesting and impressive as Frank Stockton's bookseller found the "Logarithm of the Diapason."

Let me quote again from John Burroughs:

"A great many people admire nature; they write admiring things about her; they apostrophize her beauties; they describe minutely pretty scenes here and there; they climb mountains to see the sun set, or the sun rise, or make long journeys to find waterfalls, but nature's real lover listens to their enthusiasm with coolness and indifference. Nature is not to be praised or patronized. You cannot go to her and describe her; she must speak through your heart. The woods and fields must melt into your mind, dissolved by your love of them.

"The passion for nature is by no means a mere curiosity about her, or an itching to portray certain of her features; it lies deeper and is probably a form of, or closely related to, our religious instincts."

And from Bradford Torrey:

But

"I hope I am not lacking in a wholesome disrespect for sentimentality and affectation; for artificial ecstasies over sunsets and landscapes, birds, and flowers; the fashionable cant of nature worship, which is enough to seal a true worshiper's lips under a vow of everlasting silence. such repugnances belong to the library and the parlor, and are left behind when a man goes abroad, either by himself or in any other really good company. For my own part the first lisp of a chickadee out of a wayside thicket disperses with a breath all such unhappy and unhallowed recollections. Here is a voice sincere and the response is instantaneous and irresistible."

CHAPTER IV

CORRELATING NATURE STUDY

"Oh, yes, we know all about correlation; we have had full instructions, read topical outlines and schedules in our teachers' journals; had it reiterated to us at the Institutes; seen it advocated in the schedules of nature study for each month, and, therefore we know all about it. Of course we correlate nature study. We correlate it with drawing, language lessons, writing, and even with arithmetic and geography, so we are all right on that, and we need no further instruction."

If you really have correlated nature study in all those ways, and insisted upon it in all cases, you have done exactly what you should not have done. You have shaken water and oil together and made a compound, good neither for lubrication nor for quenching thirst. Or, to use another simile, you have flavored a dose of castor oil with wintergreen, and made a mess. You may have helped the oil, but you have made it mighty bad for the wintergreen!

Have you really been using nature study,

that is, original investigation on the part of the child? Have you not simply used a few natural objects in the various kinds of work that you have mentioned? If so, and, I really hope it is so, you are after all not guilty of spoiling the wintergreen.

Not long ago I attended, in a high school assembly-room, an exhibition of the work of the grade schools in the town. As I entered the hall, a supervising teacher came forward and said, "I am glad you came; I know you will be interested in everything, but I want especially to show you what we have done in nature study. I know you are interested in 'such things.""

Indeed, I was interested and proud too, of the good results attained by the schools, for the exhibition showed lines of work that were truly remarkable.

"There,” said my fair guide, as we approached a particularly attractive table, "I know you'll like this. Isn't that beautiful? How well our children do it! Isn't it surprising? Don't you think they've done well?"

Truly it was a beautiful exhibit; the children had done well. I said so frankly, and expressed surprise that so excellent work should have been

accomplished by children who were so young, as shown by their ages marked on the specimens.

"Aren't you glad that our schools are doing so good nature work?" exclaimed the enthusiastic teacher.

"Nature work! Where is it?"

I was not diplomatic, I know, with such an interlocutor and after so cordial a greeting. The words slipped out without a thought.

"Here, here; what are you thinking about? This nature work; isn't it beautiful?"

"Yes, it is beautiful drawing, neat writing, correct capitalization and punctuation," I hesitatingly equivocated, as I picked up a prose paraphrase of Bryant's "Fringed Gentian," decorated with "original" drawings. There was at the end a little angel with wings, and an anchor with a chain gracefully twined around it.

"Hope blossoming within my heart,

May look to heaven as I depart."

Then came Emerson's beautiful fable of "The Mountain and the Squirrel."

"The mountain and the squirrel

Had a quarrel;

And the former called the latter "Little Prig;"

Bun replied

You are doubtless very big."