THE NATURALISTS OUTLOOK' 27 



Teachers, New York Training School for Teachers, Children's 

 School Farm, the Public Education Association, New York 

 Aquarium, DeWitt Clinton High School, High School of Com- 

 merce, St. Agatha School of Xew York, and several public 

 schools of New York and neighboring cities. 



F. L. Holtz, Sec. Pro Tern. 



THE NATURALIST'S OUTLOOK AND SCHOOL 

 NATURE-STUDY 



By EDWARD F. BIGELOW, Stamford. Connecticut 



One of the best sentences ever published in The Nature- 

 Study Review, the most expressive, the fullest of truth — 

 mighty solemn truth, is this from the article on "Booming 

 Nature-Study," on page 260 of the issue for December, 1907 : 



"We who are naturalists in vocation or avocation must remem- 

 ber that, after all, naturalists represent comparativelv a rare 

 variety of the human genus, and our own outlook on the world 

 may be quite unintelligible to a large majority of our intelligent 

 fellow men." 



Will our nature-study specialists please take that fact into 

 their mental laboratories and dissect it, and tell the whvs and 

 wherefores of it? In the word of the great philosopher who in- 

 quired, "Where are we at""", please explain what we are "at" 

 that will change the situation (so well described in the excellent 

 quoted sentence) a generation from now. Is it desirable that it 

 should be changed? If not, why not? 



In the same number was a notice of my book, "The Spirit of 

 Nature-Study," in which the reviewer says, "Most chapters of the 

 book have no particular bearing on school nature-study." Will 

 some one please explain wherein "the spirit" of school nature- 

 study (I do not mean materials or methods) is different from that 

 of the amateur naturalists, different from that we would like to 

 see all men and women possess; but that, as the editor of The 

 Review so truly says, they do not now possess. 



In all this nature-study talk, do we not limit it too much to 

 children and schools ? Will we ever achieve our aims by so sharplv 

 setting off a "school nature-study" from "our intelligent fellow 



