6 THE NATURE-STUDY REVIEW [6:1-Jan., 1910 



bus of college requirements. It has, of course, suffered from 

 the great pressure of other subjects to gain admission, but it 

 has suffered most by certain projects imposed upon it. The 

 general aim of the work, so far as the printed announcements 

 of it go, has always been good. It seems to have been con- 

 sistently maintained for half a century at least that the purpose 

 of this instruction is the interpretation of nature and of life's 

 experiences, but the method of procedure has always been a 

 series of trials and failures which might all be characterized 

 as steps preparatory to doing something, which thing was never 

 really reached. It was conceived of as merely preparation for 

 high school science or for college science or for some exper- 

 ience to be met later in life. It had nothing to do with present 

 experiences, but was a sort of getting ready of tools for future 

 work. We have had series of lessons for teaching observation 

 as a ''faculty," claimed to be of great importance for some fu- 

 ture occasion. We have had wearisome lessons on the correct 

 use of "scientific terms" — -definitions of attributes and of things, 

 sometimes illustrated with objects, to be sure, but without pre- 

 senting any science to which the terms applied and without 

 offering any excuse for having the terms. We have had an 

 era of teaching the art of "classification" in physical as well as 

 in biological science. A list of a dozen so-called "properties" 

 of matter have been defined, and if we illustrated them by ob- 

 jects or by experiments we felt quite up to date in our methods. 

 We have laid great stress upon the necessity of distinguishing 

 between adhesion and cohesion, gravity and gravitation, mass 

 and weight, dew falling and dew collecting, three classes of 

 levers, and "six mechanical powers". We have tried to make 

 the children afraid to use the word "force" lest it should be 

 "unscientific", but our labors have been of no avail for they 

 have discovered that all men, learned and unlearned, use these 

 terms indiscriminately, and wholly without fear of consequences ; 

 and like the rest of us, they rely upon the assurance that lan- 

 guage will continue to be made by custom in spite of the 

 schools. How the interpretation of nature is to be furthered 

 by this punctilious attention to the latest conventions in sci- 

 entific parlance, no one has attempted to show. 



History shows that education, although a very conservative 

 thing, must be conventional and must follow — even if from afar 

 — the customs of a people and of the times. We are living in 



