An Effort to Help the Farmer. 261 



world. The high school pupil and the college student may study botany ; 

 but the child should study plants. It need not necessariW be a stated part 

 of the curriculum. In fact, with a good teacher it is all the better if it is 

 spontaneous. 



Nature-stud}' can often be made a corollary of the geography, drawing, or 

 language. For example, during the language period, the children in the 

 sixth grade of one of the Saratoga Springs schools had some of their nature- 

 study work for the topic of their compositions. In this instance wheat 

 had been sown in egg shells, filled with earth obtained at the flor- 

 ist's, and each egg shell was a pupil's farm ; and he eagerly watched 

 the germination of the seed in his wheat field until the blades had 

 attained a height of two to three inches. Here the botanical side 

 was made a lesson, well flavored with active interest. The pride of 

 ownership and a plant coming from a spoonful of earth had the 

 charm of a creation all his own, and it was much more real to study the 

 thing itself than to read about it and to make a recitation. The lesson 

 was well inculcated that the first shoots of root and stalk had to subsist on 

 a lunch of starch, prepared by the parent plant, until the plantlet springing 

 from the kernel could obtain its own living from the soil and air, and that 

 these starch lunches give wheat and other grains a commercial value. 

 The interest is now awakened in the necessity that the farmer should pre- 

 pare a fine seed-bed in his soil, and in the details of sowing, harvesting and 

 milling. Some of the diseases and insect enemies of the wheat plant can be 

 taken up and will be retained by the child because he has an interest in a 

 living thing. Drawings can be made of many of the stages of growth of 

 the plant in the egg shell. Wheat can be made to correlate with the 

 geography by tracing its introduction and extension and transportation. 

 By means of the exchange of correspondence, the wheat belt can be traced 

 and plotted in every State of the Union. The children, through their 

 teachers, in the States of Texas, Alabama, Louisiana and Georgia have shown 

 most hearty co-operation in the exchange of correspondence, telling of the 

 leading agricultural products. 



Again, the children of Corning, during September and October, gath- 

 ered seeds and divided them into classes as indicated by the means of travel 

 that nature had provided. Some seeds, for instance, travel by means of a 

 balloon ; others catch onto passing objects, clothing, hair of animals, like 

 tramps upon a passing freight train ; and some have rudders to guide them 

 through the air. A small boy felt himself a profound investigator when 

 he discovered the advantage that some seeds have because they can 

 float and take a ride on the water. Two men were heard discussing 

 the wonderful vitality of weed seeds found in soil taken from a well 

 twelve feet deep, asserting that after the clay from the bottom had 

 remained exposed to the action of weather for a year or so, the growth 

 of a few weeds followed. The children of Corning, after their investi- 

 gations, could very well tell where the seeds of the weeds came from. 



The pupils of Jamestown write most interestingly of their experience in 



