heiney] NATURE-STUDY AND ENGLISH 155 



better results if you transform your schoolroom, for the time 

 being, into a laboratory. 



Bring in, if possible, enough individuals of any one specimen 

 to supply each member of the class with an object for examination. 

 For example, let us take a cottonwood leaf. What is its shape : 

 What the condition of its surfaces — upper and lower? What 

 the character of its margin ? Examine its veining. Lead the child 

 to discover these characteristics and others, and report them to 

 you. Xext day examine a maple leaf in the same way. If in two 

 sittings you exhaust the study of the two specimens, bring both 

 for the third day, or when you have finished study of each, with 

 the two specimens before you and your pupils, have them study 

 likenesses and differences. Have members of the class point out 

 features in common, and points of difference. This practice of 

 comparing and contrasting, I believe to be of more value to the de- 

 velopment of the child mind than the first study of the speci- 

 mens. In fact, the former is but the preparation for the latter. 

 By it he learns to distinguish and discriminate, and from it he 

 must draw conclusions. Most of you, no doubt, have met people 

 who have seen or have found petrified potatoes, petrified corn- 

 cobs, etc., which, when investigated scientifically, had no resem- 

 blance whatever to the potato or corn-cob, except in contour. 

 What was the trouble with the finder's observation? He — and he 

 is the nine hundred and ninety-nine out of one thousand — has 

 never had his powers of discrimination developed. The man or 

 the woman who is without this power of discriminating, either 

 from the want of the faculty, or the lack of its development, is 

 incapable of rendering a judgment; and conversely, the more 

 highly it has been developed, the sounder are the judgments 

 rendered. 



These studies, investigations and mental excursions for knowl- 

 edge, to be of the greatest value to the child, must employ all 

 the human organs of knowledge-getting — seeing, hearing, feeling, 

 tasting, smelling. In fact, nature-study easily affords all neces- 

 sary sense training. 



It were belittling nature-study, however, to abandon her when 

 one has beheld her beauty, observed her parts, torn the object of 

 observation — perchance of admiration — asunder, named and fixed 

 the relation of organs, or even determined the occasion of their 

 existence, function or destiny. As an educational scheme, no 



