1 82 



THE GUIDE TO NATURE 



Approval of Nature Education. 



The publishers of "The Indepen- 

 dent," New York City, are sending out 

 copies of that magazine to various 

 schools and soliciting" their advertise- 

 ments. In the editorial columns, the 

 magazine has a suggestion of an ideal 

 advertisement, as follows : 



"To be scholars of Nature and hu- 

 man nature is our first aim ; of books 

 the second. We shall honor culture, 

 but intellectual power more. Believing 

 that a wholesome body is essential to 

 a wholesome mind, we shall aim to 

 educate both body and mind together. 

 We shall live out of doors forenoons, 

 thinking, studying, working and learn- 

 ing of Nature ; but afternoons we shall 

 spend with books." 



Will "The Independent" kindly in- 

 form us if it has discovered any private 

 school in all this land that gives such 

 prominence to the study of nature? 

 Let us find such a school and we will 

 extol it to the ends of the earth ; show 

 us a school in which nature study is 

 not treated as a minor issue, an unim- 

 portant appendage, and relegated to 

 the end of the week or to leisure hours 

 which must be occupied by some- 

 thing, and that school shall be made 

 known at the ends of the earth. We 

 fear that "The Independent" is inde- 

 pendent of this century, and is looking 

 in vain and anticipating the future by 

 a hundred years, if it hopes to find any 

 school in the land that realizes that the 

 pupils are to grow to be men and 



women to live in this world, and should 

 know how to profit by its interests and 

 beauties. 



"The Public Has Failed You Support." 



These are the words with which the 

 owner of Arcadia closed his letter re- 

 questing us to vacate the place. While 

 they are true only in a sense they are 

 wholly true from the point of view 

 from which he made them and from 

 which he might reasonably be expected 

 to make them. We recognize the fact 

 that the ten thousand persons reached 

 by us every month are very far from 

 being the whole of the hundred million 

 people that constitute "the public" in 

 this country. Within a radius of even 

 fifty miles from Arcadia there are more 

 than five million people, and to a capi- 

 talist accustomed to do things on a 

 large scale it must be admitted that 

 even our success in reaching ten thou- 

 sand for all the world may, to him, 

 seem like failure. 



Every one of these ten thousand in 

 his hearty enthusiasm is undoubtedly 

 puzzled to know why others have not 

 manifested a similar interest. The 

 reason is very nicely explained in an 

 article in "The American Botanist." 

 That magazine, commenting on the 

 fact that The Carnegie Corporation of 

 New York City has recently been in- 

 corporated to aid in the promotion 

 of science, speaks as follows : 



"For some years signs of a growing 

 interest in the spread of useful know- 



