Rural School Leaflet 963 



JOHN BURROUGHS 

 The Editor 



A naturalist, writer, farmer, living and working in our time;. such a man 

 is John Burroughs, and every boy and girl should know something of the 

 life he leads in his home, Slabsides, and of his rich contribution to the 

 nature literature of the world. A deep sincerity marks his personality 

 and work. 



Every teacher should try to have in the rural school library three or 

 four volumes of Burroughs's works. When the weather permits, he might 

 take the boys and girls out of doors and read a chapter or two selected to 

 meet the age of the children. The simplicity of the Hfe of this great man 

 and his way of nature seeking will be suggestive to both teacher and 

 pupils. 



i Burroughs says that he is not always in sympathy with nature-study 

 as it is taught in the schools. " Such study," he states, " is too cold, too 

 special, too mechanical; it is likely to rub the bloom off nature; it misses 

 the accessories of the open air and its exhilarations, the sky, the clouds, 

 the landscape, and the currents of Hfe that pulse everywhere." This 

 message should be considered by teachers. The schoolroom work should 

 always be suggestive for live out-cf-door interest and intelligent observa- 

 tion. 



By courtesy of the Atlantic Monthly we are able to present the following 

 excerpts from an article entitled " Fifty Years of John Burroughs," by 

 Dallas Lore Sharp: 



" Take Mr. Burroughs's work as a whole, and it is beyond dispute the 

 most complete, the most revealing, of all our outdoor literattire. His 

 pages lie open like the surface of a pond, sensitive to every wind, or calm as 

 the sky, holding the clouds and the distant blue, and the dragon-fly, stiff- 

 winged and pinned to the golden knob of a spatter-dock. 



"All outdoor existence, all outdoor phenomena, are deeply interesting 

 to him. There is scarcely a form of outdoor life, scarcely a piece of land- 

 scape, or natural occurrence, characteristic of the Eastern States, which 

 has not been dealt with suggestively in his pages: the rabbit under his 

 porch; the paleozoic pebble along his path; the salt breeze borne inland 

 by the Hudson ; the flight of an eagle ; the whirl of a snow-storm ; the work 

 of the honeybees; the processions of the seasons over Slabsides; even the 

 abundant soil out of which he and his grapes grow and which, ' incor- 

 ruptible and undeliled,' he calls divine. 



" Mr. Burroughs is not an idylist but an essayist, with a love for books 

 only second to his love for nature; a watcher in the woods, a tiller of the 



