I 2 THE NA TU RE-STUD Y RE VIE W [ 4 : i- JAN ., igo 8 



course such work was not nature-study, neither was it science; 

 it was merely a sign of educational imbecility, a disease by no 

 means confined to a single locality. 



All of which goes to show that nature-study is not a definite 

 and specific body of knowledge, but an attitude of mind; that its 

 results are in no wise to be measured in terms of accumulated 

 facts, but in an attitude of mind in the presence of facts. The 

 thought that nature-study is a body of knowledge has done very 

 much to retard its advance, very much more to confuse a matter 

 which is, after all is said, extremely simple. If nature-study is 

 merely the name for a device for securing a symmetrical intellect- 

 ual development through a wise training of the senses by the use 

 of environmental material, then the notion so widely prevalent 

 that nature-study necessarily means birds and flowers and in- 

 sects and trees is an erroneous one. If it were true, nature-study 

 would be practically impossible in the congested districts of our 

 great cities or could at best be but imperfectly presented. It is 

 difficult, however, for one to see why the habits of life, the food- 

 gathering and food-storing, the architecture and activities 

 of the animal known as man should not furnish material as valu- 

 able and interesting as do other animals. 



It is extremely doubtful whether nature-study in narrow 

 connotation of the past and of far too many schools at present 

 is of any value at all commensurate with the time given to it in 

 the schedule. On the other hand it is obvious that work which 

 closely relates the daily life and the school life, which uses the 

 objects and phenomena of the environment as educational 

 material has a value so high that it can scarcely be over- 

 estimated. These values can be secured only through the 

 orderly and logically progressive training of the senses — the 

 external organs of relation; by at least keeping functional 

 these powers upon the strength, rapidity and precision of which 

 so much of self-reliance and initiative ultimately depend. 



It goes without saying that the great bulk of nature-study 

 work of the future as in the past will be done with plants and 

 animals as the material; that in some cases it will be even 

 narrowed to useful plants and animals in the name of agriculture 

 in the schools, but any attempt to organize the plant studies 

 so as to present even the grosser, salient points of botany or to so 

 organize the studies of useful plants and animals that, by a sum- 



