PECK] A NEGLECTED SIDE OE NATURE-STUDY 12 t 



insects placed within it, and too, the insects usually collected 

 have short lives anyway. So far as the child is concerned he is 

 thinking of his collection of moths or butterflies and not at all of 

 taking life, so it is not teaching him to destroy wantonly living 

 creatures. However, an indiscriminate encouragement of the 

 making of insect collections cannot be advised. There are some 

 children who will profit by it and some who will not, and un- 

 questionably the best kind of study of insects is watching their 

 interesting ways. 



To kill a creatvire in order to prepare it for a nature-study 

 lesson is not only wrong but absurd, for nature-study has to do 

 wath life rather than death, and the form of any creature is' 

 interesting only when its adaptations for life are studied. But 

 again a nature-study teacher may be an opportunist ; if without 

 any volition of pupils or teachers a freshly killed specimen comes 

 to hand she should make the most of it. The writer remembers 

 most illuminating lessons from a partridge that broke a window 

 and its neck simultaneously during its flight one winter night; 

 a yellow hammer that killed itself against an electric wire, and a 

 muskrat that turned its toes to the skies for no understandable 

 reason; in each of these cases the creature's special physical 

 adaptations for living its own peculiar life were studied, and the 

 effect was not the study of a dead thing but of a successful and 

 wonderful hfe. 



A NEGLECTED SIDE OF NATURE-STUDY 



By R. C. PECK 



Normal School, Huntington, W. Va. 



It has always seemed to me that correct notions about the 

 great principles which underlie all those applications of science 

 which make our modern civilization possible ought to be a part 

 of the heritage of every boy and girl of the twentieth century. 

 With the great majority of children leaving school before they 

 finish the grammar grades, the only opportunity for this seems 

 to be in the nature-study work. 



The importance of this sort of thing — physical nature-study it 

 might be called— seems to be generally recognized. Professor 

 McMurry in his "Special Method In Elementary Science" gives it 

 considerable space in his Outline of Nature-Study and the editor 



