were drawn upon. Great enthusiasm prevailed; the facts found out and told or written by the children, you may be sure, were the facts that interest children. It was a good study of what to teach in geography.

On other days, as called for by the course of study, other themes were treated with a like appropriateness. But, whatever the topic, whether Japan or South Africa, or Germany or England, or coal mining, or dairying, or making cotton cloth, a very real and very vivid impression was left with the children. They really knew what they had studied. They could never again be wholly indifferent to any one of these subjects. Moreover, the knowledge was organized. It was all properly grouped about a suitable nucleus. Through it the children were supplied with apperceptive centers for the placing of new facts and with geographic principles to explain new phenomena.

This was accomplished by a single teacher with many successive classes, without much help from her superior officers. It should be encouraging to teachers who know how geography should be taught but are compelled still to use inferior textbooks or to follow antiquated or insufficient courses of study. Unless teachers grasp these principles, not even ideal books and courses of study will secure the best results.

CHAPTER XVIII

NATURE STUDY

"NATURE STUDY" has meanings almost as numerous as the schools pursuing it. It came in late as one of the forms of protest against the game of logomachy into which school studies had degenerated in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. From its name it is evident that it was intended to indicate return to nature," a reëstablishment of the connection between the education of children and the physical environment in which their lives must be spent.

Aim of Nature Study.—At its best it is the study of the phenomena of the physical world with the more or less definite aim of discovering some of the laws that cause them, and their significance to human beings. It differs from the study of natural science much as the "language lessons" of the elementary school differ from grammar. Its chief purposes are to open the eyes to the wonders and beauties of the environing world, to create sympathetic interest in all animate creatures, and to restore the sense of reality in a system of education quite given over to verbal statements about things. It was a product or corollary of the interest in scientific study which followed the promulgation of Darwin's theories. The aim is most worthy, and there was, and still is, abundant need for such an equilibrant.

Still Chaotic. schools still is in a chaotic, unorganized, possibly a formative, state. It began with the "object lessons" which some of us remember, a loose, unsystematic exercise consisting mainly of reciting stated facts about the common phenomena of physics, accompanied by a little individual observation. This gave way to a more orderly study of elementary science. In some schools, quite elaborate systems were developed, with full courses in the elements of botany and zoölogy, and even with special supervisors to direct the instruction. These attempts rather overshot the mark and contributed much to the overcrowding of the curriculum. At present the study seems to be settling into the place of adjutant, supplying topics and material for correlation with language and with geography, varying with the interest and knowledge of the teacher. Its best present-day manifestations are school gardens, terraria and aquaria in the schoolroom, and "field lessons." Manifestly nature study must vary, more widely than any other study, with the environment.

However, nature study in elementary

Early Blunders.—The greatest mistake of the earlier teaching of this subject in schools was the attempt to observe natural objects out of their natural relations. A bug, a frog, a crayfish, were brought in to the school, dissected, discussed, and scientifically classified. This had little value, very little, in cultivating close observation. It did nothing to acquaint children with environing nature, to open their eyes to the beauties of sky and meadow, brook and plowed field, to make them love the voice of the bird, wonder at the marvelous adaptations of plant and animal life. The objects chosen were difficult to

obtain and, when observed away from their habitats, not very interesting to the children. The anatomy of the animal or the plant was treated as of more consequence than its life.

The Near rather than the Remote.-Nature study for children should be the study of the near rather than of the remote. The geological history of a grain of sand from the road is vastly more worth while than that of a fragment of gneiss from the museum. Nature study should be out of doors as far as possible, the study of what is immediate and common.

Professor L. H. Bailey says in "The Outlook to Nature":"The first consideration of special study should be the inhabitants of your yard and garden; they are yours, or if they are not, you are not living a right life."

Even in the most crowded parts of a big city, the paving stones and the gutters and the ever present sparrows present interesting problems for nature study. Besides, there are the parks, with their birds and trees and flowers.

In the small town and especially in the country, nature is everywhere asking to be understood. If children could only be put into sympathetic touch with her "in her various moods," it would go far toward restoring a more beautiful and a saner life.

In the language of Walt Whitman (quoted by Professor Bailey),

"There was a child went forth every day,

And the first object he look'd upon, that object he became,

And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the day,

Or for many years or stretching cycles of years.

"The early lilacs became part of this child,

And grass and white and red morning-glories, and white and red clover, and the song of the phoebe-bird,

And the third-month lambs and the sow's pink-faint litter, and the mare's foal and the cow's calf,

And the noisy brood of the barnyard or by the mire of the pond-side,

And the fish suspending themselves so curiously below here, and the beautiful curious liquid,

And the water-plants with their graceful flat heads, all became part of him."

Lord Avebury, in a fine passage on the same subject, remarks: "If Spring came but once in a lifetime; if the sun rose and set once in a year instead of once in a day; if a rainbow appeared once in a century; if flowers were as rare as rubies and dewdrops as diamonds, how wonderful would they seem, how they would astonish and delight us. We undervalue them because they are lavished on us. The very word 'common' most improperly implies some disparagement. If we trained our minds properly in the appreciation of beauty, we should, on the contrary, wonder at and admire them all the more."

In a still finer passage, Emerson says: "If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile."

But the sort of harmony with nature suggested by Whitman and of appreciation indicated by Avebury and Emerson are not to be brought about by observing and