260 THE NATURE-STUDY REVIEW [ 4 : 9 -dkc. 1908, 



its first question, "What is the earth?" and with its ready-made 

 answer, "The earth is a great globe revolving in space," has given 

 place to the new with its first statement, "Children, you have 

 often played in the dirt." That's bringing the earth down from 

 the rarefied regions of mature speculation and placing it under 

 the finger tips of the child! All the so-called natural sciences 

 which, sewed and bound in "fourteen weeks" doses, were quite 

 apart from nature and all that is natural, have felt the thrill of 

 this nature-study life along their keel. Work in reading and 

 literature, in history and mathematics have responded to the 

 levening influence of this lump of nature-study. Books and 

 apparatus, sand-tables and museums, aquariums and window- 

 boxes, excursions and experimental farming, this is the path and 

 the course of events along which and through which the nature- 

 study spirit has lead the old time course of study. If the moun- 

 tain could not be brought into the schoolroom to Mahomet, 

 nature-study made one for him in the sand-table. If Mahomet 

 could not go to the mountain his teacher took him to a near-by 

 hill. 



While the text-book, the picture, the model, and the stuffed 

 specimen are the friends and allies of the nature-study spirit, they 

 are but its leserve batteries planted within the fort, — its outposts 

 are in the fields, along the streams, among the trees. It has con- 

 verted field, forest and stream into a laboratory, a demonstration 

 room. It has made the school a part of the life that is. It has 

 not only put "tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, ser- 

 mons in stones," but it has put trees in the tongues of the children, 

 running brooks m their reading books, and the story of the stones 

 into the choicest sermons. 



When primitive man went into a school to get the interpreta- 

 tion of a book he did well, but when the book of symbols began to 

 close for him the book of nature it was not well. Each book lias 

 its place and that place is close beside the other. The nature- 

 study movement has done its great work in placing these two 

 books closer together and in filling them both fuller of meaning. 



