STATE POMOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 99 



FRUIT AND FLOWER STUDY IN ITS RELATION 

 TO THE PRIMARY SCHOOLS, ILLUSTRATED WITH 

 LANTERN SLIDES. 



John Craig, Professor of Extension Teaching, Cornell Univer- 

 sity, Ithaca, N. Y. 



As the first speaker was so beautifully portraying the delights 

 of nature study before you, a little story which I once read came 

 to mind. The story was told somewhat on this wise : Two men 

 ploughed adjacent fields. The one ploughed straight furrows; 

 he put up his sighting posts and directed his horses accurately 

 to the mark ahead kept his eye on the mark and looked not to 

 the right nor to the left. He did not notice the clouds in the sky 

 nor the flying butterfly ; but he ploughed his field well, and har- 

 vested richly. His mind was upon the accumulation of wealth. 

 His neighbor across the way ploughed also, but his furrows 

 wandered this way and that way. He sometimes stopped to 

 examine a stone ; he occasionally paused to study a weed or plant ; 

 a butterfly attracted his attention. The one man grew rich, his 

 son inherited his money, left the farm, went into the world spent 

 it as rapidly as possible. The son of the other man grew up a 

 companion of his father and became one of the most famous of 

 landscape artists. There is a moral in that tale, a moral in which 

 training and heredity play an important part. 



And so let us begin our views of nature study, what it is, what 

 it may do, and how we may carry it out, with a picture of various 

 types of homes, because the home being the center of the universe 

 is the place where all culture should begin. 



We cannot all have homes of this sumptuous kind. Here 

 nature, and art the handmaiden of nature, have combined to make 

 a picture at once artistic and magnificent. We cannot all have 

 homes like this, nor need any of us in this country have homes 

 like this hovel. That was a home. I took a picture of it myself 

 and it was in New York state. We are not advertising that kind 

 of home in New York state, nevertheless there are such habita- 

 tions, such places where people dwell, where children are brought 

 up and from which they go out into the world and expecting to 

 take their place in the world, to improve the world. 



Query : Do they? 



