1 42 THE NA TURE-STUD Y RE VIE IV U : 5— may, 190S 



the sciences offered, physics is the most constant, because this 

 subject is given in the high schools as college preparatory work. 

 Some high schools recognize two classes of physics work — one to 

 prepare students for the colleges of applied science at the uni- 

 versities, the other to give the literary student a measure of 

 manual training through the laboratory practice. In the one 

 group of students it inspires or fosters the spirit of the mechanic 

 or of the engineer ; to the other group it remains a bugbear that 

 must be gotten through with in order to satisfy the requirements 

 for college entrance. 



Chemistry, as given in the high school, is too often of no value or 

 interest to the pupil after he leaves the laboratory. 



Botanv, zoology and physical geography, the sciences which 

 would contribute toward a nature-study preparation 1 , are offered 

 by a very small proportion of applicants. The work done in the 

 biological sciences is morphological and systematic, sometimes 

 physiological, almost never dynamic. Such preparation is of 

 some value for nature-study in acquainting the student with 

 terminology and with some facts of general interest, if both of 

 these phases of knowledge are not used improperly. The cases 

 are more rare, however, where they afford an enjoyable personal 

 acquaintance with the organisms studied. In the writer's own 

 case, he was a graduate student doing research work with a cer- 

 tain group of animals, working over preserved material for 

 months before he saw the live animal and appreciated its deli- 

 cate, translucent coloring. 



The sins of the educational father are visited upon the children 

 even unto the third and fourth school generations. The college 

 graduate, teaching in the high school, given the same kind of 

 work as he himself is most full of, does not stop to consider that 

 the university might have been training him for research in pure 

 science or for such applied sciences as medicine, sanitation or 

 plant pathology. The high-school graduate, certificated by ex- 

 amination, teaches such science as he has not forgotten and calls 

 the result nature-study. 



The experience of the writer thus far is that, even to the stu- 

 dent matriculated with credit in several sciences or to the college 



['Editor's Note. — The author obviously has in mind biological nature- 

 study, but such limitation of nature-study is disappearing rapidly.] 



