The Teaching of Nature-Study n 



ered for themselves. This story should not be told as a finality or as a 

 complete picture but as a guide and inspiration for further study. Always 

 leave at the end of the story an interrogation mark that will remain ag- 

 gressive and insistent in the child's mind. To illustrate: Once a club 

 of junior naturalists brought me rose leaves injured by the leaf-cutter 

 bee and asked me why the leaves were cut out so regularly. I told 

 them the story of the use made by the mother bee of these oval and cir- 

 cular bits of leaves and made the account as vital as I was able; but at 

 the end I said, "I do not know which species of bee cut these leaves. 

 She is living here among us and building her nest with your rose leaves 

 which she is cutting every day almost under your very eyes. Is she 

 then so much more clever than you that you cannot see her nor find her 

 nest?" For two years following this lesson I received letters from mem- 

 bers of this club. Two carpenter bees and their nests were discovered by 

 them and studied before the mysterious leaf-cutter was finally ferreted 

 out. My story had left something interesting for the young naturalists 

 to discover. The children should be impressed with the fact that the 

 nature story is never finished. There is not a weed nor an insect nor a 

 tree so common that the child, by observing carefully, may not see things 

 never yet recorded in scientific books; therefore the supplementary story 

 should be made an inspiration for keener interest and further investi- 

 gation on the part of the pupil. The supplementary story simply thrusts 

 aside some of the obscuring underbrush thus revealing more plainly the 

 path to further knowledge. 



THE NATURE-STUDY ATTITUDE TOWARD LIFE AND DEATH 



ERHAPS no greater danger besets the pathway of the 

 nature-study teacher than the question involved in her 

 pupils' attitude toward life and death. To inculcate in 

 the child a reverence for life and yet to keep him from 

 becoming mawkish and morbid is truly a problem. It 

 is almost inevitable that the child should become sym- 

 pathetic with the life of the animal or plant studied, 

 since a true understanding of the life of any creature 

 creates an interest which stimulates a desire to protect this particular 

 creature and make its life less hard. Many times, within my own ex- 

 perience, have I known boys, who began by robbing birds' nests for egg 

 collections, to end by becoming most zealous protectors of the birds. 

 The humane qualities within these boys budded and blossomed in the 

 growing knowledge of the lives of the birds. At Cornell University, it is 

 a well known fact that those students who tuni aside so as not to crush 

 the ant, caterpillar or cricket on the pavement are almost invariably 

 those that are studying entomology; and in America it is the botanists 

 themselves who are leading the crusade for flower protection. 



Thus, the nature-study teacher, if she does her work well, is a sure aid 

 in inculcating a respect for the rights of all living beings to their own lives; 

 and she needs only to lend her influence gently in this direction to change 

 carelessness to thoughtfulness and cruelty to kindness. But with this 

 impetus toward a reverence for life, the teacher soon finds herself in a 

 dilemma from which there is no logical way out, so long as she lives in a 

 world where lamb chop, beefsteak and roast chicken are articles of ordi- 



