260 NATURE-STUDY REVIEW ] 11:5— May, 1915 



Editorial 



Education tends just now to deal with things, to handle the con- 

 crete. We make bread, build an arm chair, manipulate a typewriter, 

 paint a wood shed, raise vegetables, breed chickens, shoe a horse, 

 or grow a bumper crop of corn, all in the name of education. And 

 we do these things not with ulterior motives apparently but to 

 do them well. Nature-study is a part of this new movement in 

 education toward the things of every day environment. It deals 

 with objects, sees, handles, hears, tastes. All of which is good. 

 Man's life is based on things. The material progress of the race is 

 expressed in terms of man's conquest of, or better, his cooperation 

 with the things about him. Primitive man struggling up from 

 animalism used the club or smooth stone for weapon and became 

 a hunter. He struck flint and his crude cave became a warm 

 shelter. He accustomed the young goat to his presence and 

 became a herder. He stirred the ground with fire-hardened stick 

 and trained the beast to plow, becoming so a farmer. It behooves 

 us all to respect the things on which we have risen, to maintain 

 our dexterity. That person has lost a very fundamental joy who 

 does not, with rare pleasure, hoe his garden, tend his chickens, make 

 his furniture or perform some creative manual labor with satisfac- 

 tion. And yet man's distinctive life is not in the world of things 

 but in a world of ideas and ideals. Once he despairingly accepted 

 the world and longed for a better one — his happy hunting ground, 

 his heaven. Now he undertakes to help heaven appear on earth. 

 He finds cacti with cruel thorns. He proceeds to grow thornless 

 ones that serve his beast for food. He finds cattle that yield him a 

 scant supply of milk. He proceeds to develop those that give an 

 abundance for his need. He conceives an ideal wheat with sturdy 

 stalks the wind may not break, with resistance to disease, one that 

 matures early and mills well. He creates it to his liking. He finds 

 home a cave, his mate his chattel, his children slaves. Slowly his 

 ideals advance and he brings them slowly to pass, until home is 

 sanctified, his wife his equal, his children free at least during their 

 years of immaturity. And still the young see visions of a better 

 social life. 



Man, too, is a creator. Nature-study dares not stop with things. 

 It must lead on into the realm of significant ideas and ideals. To 

 sense things as they are is not enough. We must take them apart, 

 disjoint them into their elements, let our imaginations play with 



