156 THE NATURE-STUDY REVIEW [ 4 :s-may, iqo8 



welfare of the child, nature-study is primarily an effort to place 

 the child in direct, harmonious and sympathetic touch with his 

 environment. 



Any or all of the above fields are available, provided they 

 furnish material having common interest or that vital intrinsic 

 value that will stimulate the latent activities of the child. 

 Nature-study is not science neither is it elementary science. It 

 selects material from the same field as the sciences, but the point 

 of divergence is the use made of the material. The jist of the 

 whole matter was long ago succinctly expressed by one of our 

 leaders in the nature-study thought who said, "The keynote of all 

 nature-study is sympathy." Science on the other hand allies 

 itself with the formal, comprehensive, and more or less complete 

 addition to the sum of human knowledge. Having grasped this 

 underlying principle, sympathy, we may widen our vision until it 

 includes the whole range of natural phenomena, realizing at last 

 nature-study is not restricted to one line of investigation and 

 owes much of its very power to the fact that it deals freely with 

 the raw materials of all the sciences. 



The primacy given to the biological sciences has been too well 

 established and exploited to need further discussion ; but hitherto 

 we have been somewhat reluctant to admit into the "charmed 

 ring" the so-called "physical nature-study." Now, there are 

 many things in the inorganic world which are of common interest, 

 of vital human importance which we pass by because we, a book- 

 trained generation, have first become familiar with the abstract 

 phases presented by the formal sciences of astronomy, geology, 

 physics and chemistry. The simple facts of the inorganic world 

 always appeal to the child. Approached from the child's point 

 of view, the earth, the air, the sky, the properties of matter, the 

 forces of nature are all full of absorbing interest. Let any teacher 

 who doubts the truth of this statement take an inventory of the 

 confiscated toys in her desk. Has not the growing boy a peren- 

 nial interest in such mechanical toys as compasses, motors, bells, 

 and a legion of other practical demonstrations of the application 

 of the formal laws set down in physics? Even the youngest 

 child is interested in the mystery of the heavens, and it is quite 

 possible to teach the children in the grades simple facts about the 

 sun, stars and constellations without even mentioning the nebular 

 hypothesis, or going into the intricacies of astronomical calcula- 



