MGELOW 



ES TA BLISHED PR I A CI PL ES OE A r A TURE-S TUD Y 



which touch our every-day life and (2) that simple observational 

 study is his one approved method of learning these best things. 

 Wherein does the author of "Nature Study and Life" not agree 

 with any essential of the summarizing definition above ? 



Piofessor Bailey has not attempted to write a one-sentence 

 definition of nature-study; but we can make one for him by placing 

 together phrases selected from his "Nature- Study Idea." Here are 

 his words placed together from two or three paragraphs: Nature- 

 study is the direct observational study of common things in the 

 child's environment for the purpose of training the eye and the mind 

 to see and to comprehend and thus to gain a sympathetic attitude 

 towards nature for the purpose of increasing the joy of living. 

 Notice that Professors Bailey and Hodge agree on the essential 

 points, namely, observational study of common things, and for the 

 sake of influencing our every-day attitude toward nature. 



If time permitted, I would quote from many other writers on 

 nature-study whose views I have carefully considered in this compar- 

 ative study. Putting together all direct statements and suggestions 

 for practice, I find among the writers now prominently identified 

 with nature-study as an educational movement no one whose idea of 

 nature-study does not involve the following points as essentials: (1) 

 direct observational study (2) common things of nature (3) from the 

 standpoint of our human interests in nature as it touches our daily 

 life directly. This is what we now mean in theory by nature-study, 

 and practice is tending rapidly towards complete conformity with the 

 definition. 



The second established principle is that nature-study should be 

 differentiated from science. The strong tendency of recent years is 

 to reserve the word science for strictly organized knowledge. We 

 no longer properly say that a student is studying the science of 

 botany because we have seen him picking flowers by the wayside, or 

 engaged in pressing and mounting fifty specimens. All this is a 

 valuable preliminary to real botany; but botany study should be 

 strictly science study — a study of the morphological, physiological, 

 embryological, paleontological and ecological principles or general- 

 izations, around which the facts concerning plants are grouped into 

 a unified and classified mass of knowledge. Likewise in all the 

 other sciences we have come to regard science as dealing primarily 

 with principles. Now nothing could be more beyond possible dis- 

 pute than that children need facts and not principles drawn from 



