THE AIMS OF NATURE-STUDY 



BY ELLIOT R. DOWNING 

 Northern State Normal School, Marquette, Mich. 



Centuries are marked more by the ideas that dominate them 

 than by the deeds they accomplish. The Iliad gives immortality 

 to its heroes. Aristotle is infinitely more forceful now than the 

 great Alexander. The idea of evolution is the nucleus of the 

 nineteenth century thought. It has absorbed the hitherto 

 unorganized accumulation of facts and constructed them into a 

 vital whole. Its influence has permeated all departments of 

 knowledge, catalytically reconstructing astronomy, biology, 

 geology, history, sociology, psychology, child study, pedagogy, 

 and theology. It has enabled us to express old truths in more 

 cogent terminology, to organize successfully the attack upon the 

 unknown, to apprehend more completely and align ourselves 

 more perfectly with "the one increasing purpose which through 

 all the ages runs." 



We realize now that children are not little men and little 

 women but that the development of the child is a change in kind 

 as well as in degree, a change as marked as the phylogenetic 

 transition from worm to monkey. The mental life too is an 

 evolution. The powers of mind appear successively dominant, 

 contemporaneouslv with definite physical changes, (i) A 

 period of rapid physical growth of brain and other bodily organs 

 is accompanied by the rapid accumulation of sense percepts and 

 their utilization in imagery. It is a time of nervous instability, of 

 susceptible emotions, of developing will when control is best 

 achieved through the feelings. This period culminates iti and 

 apparently is terminated by the second dentition. There ensues 

 (2) a pause in the growth. The physique tills out. Energy is 

 superabundant. The organism reaches a maximum of resistance 

 to disease. The brain cells are developing their connecting pro- 

 cesses. Powers of association are at their best. Hence this is a 

 time for the correlation of sense percepts, for memory, for the 

 formation of phvsical habits. The individual is phlegmatic 

 if ever. Control must'be authoritative. (3) Then follows the 

 adolescent period, the second period of intense change with the 



