DISCUSSIONS 27 



the position he has assumed. The most important truth he has stated is that 

 nature-study is far from firmly established in our school system; to this we 

 must all agree. But this condition of things is in very large measure due to 

 just a misapprehension or the aims and values of nature-study as is 

 evinced in the article under discussion. Professedlv the primary aim 

 of nature-study (as the writer of the article conceives it) is systematic 

 zoology. With that we should begin, and with that we should end, and 

 we should get it from books. The view here advanced is so absurd that it 

 should be unnecessary to make reply. Taxonomy is man-made, subject to 

 revision, the field of the profound student; book studv is not nature-study. 

 If nature-study deserves recognition as a distinct contribution to the curri- 

 culum, certainly its merit does not lie in placing a book between nature and 

 the child. First-hand contact is essential; therein lies the whole opportunity. 

 We are teaching children, not subjects. We may be scientific, and vet not 

 organize a science. Certainlv there is a place for books, — witness Dr. Horn- 

 aday's excellent "Natural History" — but a text-book for a nature-study 

 class is a contradiction of terms and an impossibility. In classes well taught 

 there will be a reference to books and a wholesome respect for scientific 

 authority, but the atmosphere will be anything but booky. "The pupil must 

 be made to do the work," but the hearing of recitations is not nature-studv. 

 A boy cannot be forced into an appreciation of the nature world. School 

 children have worn blinders (books) so constantly that the senses seem dulled 

 and there is little of the research spirit If asked to learn something about 

 houseflies, their fist thought is toward the library. We should put a prem- 

 ium not upon information, but upon power. What we want most is not a 

 storage of facts, but trained faculties, habits of inquiry, investigation, testing, 

 verifying, interpreting data and drawing legitimate conclusions from original 

 observations. This is what makes useful men and women; the text-book 

 falls from the hand, but these things abide. 



He is a good naturalist who knows his own parish thoroughly, and to a 

 pupil of the elementary school "the mice and beetles and sparrows and 

 dog- fennel" that greet him daily are a thousand times more worthy of his 

 attention than are the phylum types of the zoologist. No better product can 

 be sent from the nature-study class to the laboratory of high school or univer- 

 sity (and to this, I believe, university men generally will assent) than the 

 pupil whose eves are open, who is alert, self-dependent, awake to his environ- 

 ment, master of himself and his surroundings; whose native endowment does 

 not cringe before the objective world to seek refuge in bibliography. Argu- 

 ing for book instruction in nature-studv, Dr. Hornadav protests because (as 

 in geography) "the great round world is approached by a long series of 



