102 STATE P0M0L0GICAL SOCIETY. 



snow falls and the ground is covered with snow and the teasel is 

 sticking up from the ground, there are things constantly before 

 us that are attractive and interesting. Here is a club of the 

 beautiful New England aster. And the animals. How many- 

 children are afraid of the domestic animals and of snakes and 

 of other things which are really in themselves harmless. This 

 is all due to a lack of familiarity. There should exist a healthy 

 companionship. 



Illustration : Cornell Junior Naturalists Clubs. 



Here is a band of junior naturalists. Now I want to tell you 

 something of the junior naturalist work of the state of New York. 

 A prime object of these organizations is to train up an army of 

 home makers. A friend of mine in Wyoming sent me a picture 

 of a home the other day. It shows the first settler, as he squatted 

 on his claim away out miles and miles from anywhere. No trees, 

 shrubs or cultivated flowers. There is too often a desire on the 

 part of home makers, of those who garnish their homes, to seek 

 the grotesque, unusual or striking, and the picture before us is 

 to illustrate that point. Now the natural things, the pictures 

 which nature creates, are vastly more beautiful than anything 

 which man has done, and that is one reason why landscape gar- 

 dening as a fine art, is superior in my opinion to painting, because 

 the man who can by using turf as a canvas and plants as pig- 

 ments make out of them a picture as beautiful as we find 

 nature has made, possesses in my opinion a higher art than the 

 man who can simply with pigments imitate nature on canvas. 



Illustration : Sheared Trees and Italian Gardens. 



Here we have the work of a gardener in trimming or contort- 

 ing plants into curious shapes, but what is there more beautiful 

 than the way in which nature builds one of our magnificent native 

 elms, whether in winter when it is denuded and bare or in sum- 

 mer when it is clothed with its beautiful drapery of green? 



And so the work of the naturalist, of the man who would teach 

 children to love nature, begins with the natural, common things 

 about him. 



Illustration : School Children at Play. 



Here is another example of energy going to waste. Is it not 

 principally a question of directing it into the proper channels? 

 Boys are said to be bad boys because things are not brought to 

 them in the right way. Study is made to appear serious work. 



