macbride] NATURE-STUDY AND SCIENCE I I 



mate purpose. Surely in all the splendid panorama of the living- 

 world there is enough to excite our intelligent interest ; surely 

 enough to arouse our warm sympathy with these forms of beauty 

 and loveliness, alheit leading lowly lives, yet lives of contented- 

 ness, happiness and purity, — surely in all this there is enough to 

 waken the sympathy and interest of every intelligent, sentient 

 soul, without metaphor, without artifice or stimulus of any sort. 

 The greatest teacher of the world bade us consider the lily " how 

 it grows " ; who of his followers in all the 2,000 years can solve 

 the problem ? The simplest problems of nature are all about us, 

 yet far-reaching to exhaust the most cunning artifice of our in- 

 quiry ; but we heed them not. Look at the splendor of our 

 autumn fields of corn ; where are the people in all these thousand 

 schools that know the secrets of the corn ? Who knows the mean- 

 ing of the sunflower, the aster, or how the chrysanthemum comes 

 by its wealth of pearl and gold, and yet anon is purple? Who 

 knows where the bobolink builds his nest, or why he is lost to-day 

 in that swarthy swarm that marks the assembly of the blackbird 

 clans all moving to the South ? Who knows the path of the wild- 

 duck in his flight and why from year to year he courses back 

 and forth, weaving the web of his destiny in the vaster mystery 

 of terrestrial life ? Who shall teach the farmers and sportsmen 

 of our country that to shoot these birds in spring is destruction, 

 a barbarism that even the savage Indians were unwilling to 

 commit ? 



But why shall nature-study be limited to plants and animals 

 alone? Among the text-books offered nowadays, there are some 

 which are much more comprehensive ; they take up in simple way 

 the phenomena of the inorganic world. This is to be commended. 

 Why, for instance, should our people be almost universally ignor- 

 ant of the simpler facts about the stars? Primitive men, men at 

 least of whose attainments their descendants are not inclined to 

 boast, long ago learned to read the shifting movements of the 

 planets, but there are to-day millions of men in the United States 

 who know not the first thing about the nightly heavens. Is there 

 any reason why an agricultural people should not find nature- 

 study in the processes which concern the making and distribution 

 of the soils? The simple truths of geology are everywhere patent 

 not in books, not in pictures, biit in fact ; in the streets, in the 

 field and garden, by the roadside, written on scratched pebbles, 



