306 TRANSACTIONS OF THE HORTICULTURAL 



genial and that educated men must perforce squeeze themselves 

 into overcrowded professions. There is a demand for educated gar- 

 deners, farmers and manufacturers. They are needed primarily 

 at their homes and at their work and then in the legislatures of 

 their respective states; and too, though it might be humiliating to 

 them, they are sadly needed in our National Congress. 



These practical men, farmers and gardeners, need a practically 

 scientific education. They need to study the forms of animal 

 and vegetable life. In a word, Biology. This comparatively new 

 subject, which after three centuries of preparation in physics and 

 chemistry has been fully reached by the scientific mind only dur- 

 ing the past fifty years, is now beginning to be realized in its full 

 import in our system of higher education. 



Biological chairs have been founded and laboratories and schools 

 of biological research have been established in connection with 

 several of the old .European Universities. And although we in 

 this country have had chairs and schools and museums of natural 

 history, yet the provision made for biological study in the organi- 

 zation of the Johns Hopkins' University at Baltimore marks a de- 

 cisive step forward in the educational treatment of this important 

 subject, but it is not alone at Johns Hopkins' University, it is not 

 alone in colleges and high schools that this subject can be taught, 

 but also it may profitably be taught in the common district school 

 and in the every day life of the child. 



The insects, and the lower and higher forms of life, that are 

 destructive to agricultural and horticultural products, are legion, 

 unfortunately so, but their insect enemies are also many, and to 

 study both. friends and foes is the province alike of the college 

 and the common school. The children must be allowed to retain 

 their original love for all forms of animal life, in so far as is con- 

 sistent with their safety. The unnatural repugnance to a slug or 

 a snail does not exist in babies, nor children rightly brought up. 

 Unperverted children are naturally fond of all the lower forms of 

 life. What is easier and more delightful, then, than to guide the 

 child-mind in a channel of observation that shall lead him to 

 study nature as he himself finds it? 



This feeling of fondness for animal life should be cherished and 

 encouraged, and made available as an impulse in early study. 

 Children, at the home and in school, from babyhood to manhood, 

 have received more or less of false impressions, and one of them 

 is dread of so small a thing as the larva of a codling-moth emerg- 

 ing from a bitten apple. A baby will place his tiny finger upon 

 it, and laugh to see it curl up. He would also pat a rattlesnake 

 upon the back, and laugh to hear its rattle. Here, evidently, 

 teaching is needed. Dread of the deadly serpent must be incul- 

 cated, and a natural curiosity in regard to living things must be 

 rightly guided, a task for both mother and teacher. ''The diffi- 

 culty for the teacher in this case," says the editor of the Popular 



