242 NATURE-STUDY REVIEW [11:5— May, 1915 



biology, and numerous minor generalizations of the sciences as 

 commonly taught to college students. Such abstracts from 

 organized sciences may be reasonable in " general science," but they 

 afford no transition from nature-study and would be illogical in a 

 course called "introduction to science." 



However, I shall not quarrel longer with the name "general 

 science," but for my present purposes accept it as one of the 

 etymological absurdities of science and education. We biologists 

 who are accustomed to such standardized misnomers as "cell," 

 "guinea pig," and even "biology" itself should be perfectly willing 

 to take a given name and make its definition fit our present con- 

 ceptions. This is what I shall do with the term "general science" 

 as I use it in this paper; and just as a biologist declares that a 

 "cell" is not a cell to all the world outside the biological limits, so 

 I am led to say that "general science" should be other than science 

 in its strict meaning, and should be defined and developed as 

 introduction to science, that is, as a transition from nature-study to 

 formal science. Perhaps "general science" may some day develop 

 to fit such a definition; but I doubt because the very name is 

 misleading. 



The position of "general science" in the public-school curriculum 

 is important for both nature-study and biology. At present it is 

 chiefly a subject for the first year of the four-year high schools; 

 but there are several reasons why it should be pushed back one or 

 two years. Most important of these is the need of beginning 

 science studies earlier than at present. In other subjects, notably 

 languages and mathematics, the pupils are in any given year of the 

 high school much more advanced than in natural science, and so 

 simply because they usually begin science in the high school with, 

 at best, an inadequate amount of very elementary nature-study 

 in the first five or six grades. Now, experience of competent 

 teachers has shown that a good course of introduction to science 

 may be begun in the seventh year, following nature-study in the 

 sixth; and if such an introduction were assigned to both seventh 

 and eighth grades, it would be possible to clear the way for a satis- 

 factory course of biology or of the most approved kind of geography 

 in the first year of four-year high schools. Without such an intro- 

 duction to science in the last grammar grades, the first high school 

 year of biology, as now given in many schools, is scarcely recognized 

 by college experts in that science, because it is such a strange hy- 



