after school if the teacher had ever been down to see his pets, and he said he had once invited her, and she seemed somewhat interested, but she must walk that afternoon with another teacher in the woods by Reginald park to get some leaves for the next day's lesson. He guessed she forgot it afterwards.

Then I forgot that Sam was walking with me, and my mind wandered again. I was thinking about some of the others in the school that had special interests, and I wondered and I wondered till there floated through my mind another thing that I had read in Professor Hodge's "Nature Study and Life: "

In adult science we have been studying dead things so long, dissecting and analyzing type-forms, that we have wellnigh gone blind to the living, active side of nature; but this has furnished the primitive and fundamental, and must furnish the larger future, interest of mankind in nature. So completely does this side monopolize our college and even university courses in biology that our teachers know nothing else to teach.

However much value this may have for the adult thought, when we attempt to teach little children we must moult it all, heed every suggestion of the Great Teacher, and become as little children ourselves.

There you have the solution. Just so long as you let dilute or elementary science (good as it

may be in its place) crowd out all nature study, just so long will you need schedules. Every time you ask for a schedule, every time you make all the pupils do the same work on the same object, you are teaching science. Not that I love science less, but, for the young folks, that I love nature study more. I appeal to you to take the things that come to hand and as they come to hand, and let your young people develop along the line of individual preferences. For nature study is not to be taught. Never make a mill of your school with an everlasting grind, grind, grind, and everything going into one hopper. You are developing human beings, human beings (not naturalists nor teachers) trained uniformly in some things, but with enough nature study and some other things to preserve and develop individuality.

And yet a mere objection to schedules does not seem to get wholly at the heart of the matter. There surely is no harm in intelligently planning a line of thought, or of suggesting to the young folks what they will find of interest for the week or month.

Perhaps we get at the real difficulty from another point of view, if we summarize by saying that it is all right for the teacher to make the schedules;

all wrong for the schedules to make the teacher. Keeping a diary may be a pleasant and profitable outpouring and developing of one's best self; the diary may be a drudge-making master. So it is with schedules. It is all in the way the teacher uses them. This does not mean a compromise with a thing of evil; it means the right use of a thing that in itself is essentially good. But it is a thing so commonly misused that it most often seems best to omit it entirely. "If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out."

Perhaps my strong dislike for schedules in nature study, amounting almost to repugnance, is due not so much to anything intrinsically wrong in having schedules as in misusing them. Your nature study must develop the spontaneity, individuality, and interest of the child. It must wake him up and lead him out as no other study can. So far as a method or definite line of thought on your part will aid in doing this, so far it is good. When your method tends toward machine instructing, then it is wholly bad. I have seen much of this bad kind, hence, not because I love schedules of the right kind less, but because I love the child more, I have said "out with them." They are dangerous unless used with extreme skill.

"Whoever has not in youth collected plants and insects, knows not half the halo of interest which lanes and hedgerows can assume. Whoever has not sought for fossils has little idea of the poetic associations that surround the place where imbedded treasures are found. Whoever at the seaside has not had a microscope and aquarium, has yet to learn what the highest pleasures of the seaside are."-HERBERT SPENCER.

"Culture consists less in wide knowledge than in wider sympathy; not so much in stores of facts as in ability to transmute facts into knowledge; not only in well-grounded conviction, but in toleration; not alone in absorption of wisdom, but as well in its radiation; in patriotism that is without provincialism; in the development of character. But since individual minds differ much in their composition, no one kind of treatment can be best for all, and the ideal system will be that which is elastic enough to allow each to receive what is best for it. True culture, then, cannot be obtained by forcing all minds into any one mould however carefully that may be made, but it is rather attained by allowing each mind to expand for itself under a proper combination of nourishment from within and stimulus from without."-WILLIAM F. GANONG, Ph. D., in "The Teaching Botanist."

CHAPTER VII

WHAT I DO CARE FOR

"Oh, I don't care for that!"

"And neither do I!" I did not say so to him, but I say it to you.

I thought (and I still think), that the principal of that normal school spoke somewhat sneeringly. I had made a distinction between the study of nature as the informal, intimate, sympathetic, unsystematic view of living things, and the pursuit of science as the formal, intellectual, professional, systematic, and synthetic treatment of animate objects. But I made no reply to the covert sneer. The conversation dropped with his remark. He seemed inclined to think that I was quibbling over a matter of names, and I felt that if I attempted an explanation it would be like showing the east where the west is.

The trouble was right here. So far as he had any views of nature he was scientific. He was a systematist. Everything that came to his mill always dropped in at the same place, and was