5 6 THE NA TURE-STUD Y RE VIE W f 4 . 2 - FEB ., igo8 



servation, those taken from chemistry, physics and mineralogy 

 have been almost always satisfactory. By satisfactory, I mean 

 the teachers have secured the results they were after, and the 

 children have been unusually attentive and have manifested un- 

 mistakable pleasure at the prospects of another lesson. I wish 

 I could report equal satisfaction and interests for the lessons 

 taken from botany and zoology. I have known instances in the 

 first grade where observation and discussion of some simple 

 physical change has been seized with avidity by the children, 

 while an attempt to stimulate an interest in a plant has fallen 

 flat. I will cite an instance that has come under my observa- 

 tion during the last two years. A young teacher taught minerals 

 to a class one year out of the kindergarten. So interested were 

 the children that they carried quartz, feldspar, mica, calcite, barite 

 etc., as pocket pieces, searched for them in the fields, and by the 

 road, traded them with one another and disputed their physical 

 properties on the playground. The same teacher was asked 

 to turn to some lessons on local animals with a later class. The 

 interest displayed by the class in grasshoppers, snails, fish, 

 toad, etc., was not particularly marked, and noticeably in- 

 ferior to that displayed in minerals by the preceding class under 

 the same teacher. I understand, of course, that this single in- 

 stance proves nothing ! But taken with a score of other instances 

 having very similar results, it does demonstrate a certain 

 tendency quite as convincingly as it would had it been per- 

 formed under standard scientific conditions. Of the hundreds 

 of teachers whose teaching of lessons from nature I recall, but 

 two or three have frankly said they did not enjoy giving simple 

 observational lessons on physical phenomena. On the other 

 hand, many have frankly expressed a dislike for lessons on plants 

 and animals, and few, any pleasure in giving lessons on these 

 objects. 



This testimony from teachers is misleading if taken without 

 reference to their educational environment. For more than 

 twenty years in the normal schools referred to, influence of a 

 very persuasive kind has been applied in favor of lessons chosen 

 from the physical realm. During the same period much less 

 thought has been expended on selecting and preparing lessons 

 from biological topics. As a consequence, a teacher con- 

 necting himself with either of these institutions enters an atmos- 



