7 2 6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



(tricinctus) which does not dig a hole in the ground for its nest. 

 The book, written by a man who did not know an armadillo 

 from a mud-turtle, gives this piece of information. It was in the 

 lesson, and the students must get it. And on this and like sub- 

 jects these boys and girls were wasting their precious time 

 precious because, if they do not learn to observe in their youth, 

 they will never learn, and the horizon of their lives will be always 

 narrower and darker than it should have been. Already the work 

 of that day is a blank. They have forgotten the nine-banded 

 armadillo and the three-banded, and so has their teacher, and so 

 have I. All that remains with them is a mild hatred of the arma- 

 dillo and of the edentates in general, and a feeling of relief at 

 being no longer under their baleful influence. But with this 

 usually goes the determination never to study zoology again. 

 And when these students later come to the college, they know no 

 more of science and its methods than they did when at the age of 

 one year they first cried for the moon. 



Darwin tells us that his early instruction in geology was so 

 " incredibly dull " that he came to the determination, afterward 

 happily changed, " never so long as he lived to read a book on 

 geology or in any way to study the subject." 



I once had a student, well trained in the conventional methods 

 of non-science, who was set to observe the yeast-plant under the 

 microscope. He had read what the books say about yeast, and 

 had looked at the pictures. So he went to work vigorously. 

 In a short time he had found out all about the little plant, and 

 had made a series of drawings which showed it very nicely. By 

 and by some one noticed that he was working without any object- 

 glass in his microscope. He had not seen the yeast -plant at all, 

 only the dust on the eye-piece. This is the vital fault of much of 

 our teaching of elementary science. It is not real ; it is not the 

 study of nature, only of the dust-heaps of old definitions. 



Yet nothing is easier than to do fairly good teaching, even 

 without special knowledge or special appliances. Bring out your 

 specimens and set them before the boys and girls. They will do 

 the work, and do it eagerly ; and they will furnish the specimens 

 too. There is no difficulty about materials. Our New World is 

 the " El Dorado " of the naturalists of Europe. You can get ma- 

 terials for a week's work by turning over a single rotten log. I 

 once heard Prof. Agassiz say to an assembly of teachers, and I 

 quote from him the more freely because he gave his life to the 

 task of the introduction of right methods into American schools : 



" Select such subjects that your students can not walk out with- 

 out seeing them. If you can find nothing better, take a house-fly 

 or a cricket, and let each one hold a specimen while you speak. 

 . . . There is no part of the country where, in the summer, you 



