stkwartJ NATURE-STUDY IN ITS PRACTICAL BEARINGS 61 



verification. Experiment should be used freely. The pupil must be 

 stimulated to develop skill and ability in growing and propagating 

 plants and in the art of making them comfortable. That is what it 

 {,11 should lead to anyhow. We need more public benefactors in the 

 Horace Greeley sense, — those who can make two blades of grass grow- 

 where only one grew before. 



The same principle holds in the study of animals. To study an 

 animal in a single stage for a small part of a single day, is nearly the 

 limit of inadequacy. We know far too little of the wild life around 

 us. We hardly know what animals should, and what should not be 

 exterminated, much less how. We ought to know the whole life stories 

 of our animal contemporaries, wild and domestic, their origin upon 

 the earth when possible, the outlines of their history in it, and especi- 

 ally what they are doing around us now both in winter and summer. It 

 is only the complete picture that will satisfy or that will enable us to 

 cope intelligently with our enemies and we should rest with nothing 

 short of it. 



This plan makes us investigators. It organizes our work. It puts 

 the text-book where it belongs — a thing to be used whenever it will 

 further our inquiries, and emphasizes the necessity of getting the liv- 

 ing animals where they can be kept under observation. We must 

 form collections. We must make aquaria and terraria, and stock 

 them with living forms, making the occupants as comfortable and put- 

 ting them as nearly into natural conditions as possible. We should 

 form permanent collections to show the life-histories, samples of work, 

 and the relations to environment of our native forms. It is no easy 

 task to do this. Eternal vigilance is the price of a good collection, 

 as well as of other things. But if properly used its value cannot be 

 over-estimated. A child will read about the transformations of insects 

 and even look at their pictures until he can recite them backwards 

 and forwards, all as a matter of course. But just place a set of forms, 

 from egg to adult, before him and tell him that these things are all 

 the same insect, and note the wonder that spreads over his face, and 

 the animated questions that spring up in the presence of the actual 

 things. Our samples of work in these collections should make 

 clear our friends and foes. We can show insects and their destroyed 

 vegetation, injured wood, grain, fruit, meat, fur, and cloth ; and on 

 the other hand we can show them as friends, scavengers, "cannibals." 

 and slayers of injurious forms. This work need not stop with insects. 

 The earthworm with its cocoon and effect on soil ; reptiles and their 



