176 ANNUAL, REPORT OF THE Off. Doc. 



ideas, must be emphasized in all but the earliest years of the course. 

 The clearest and most exact way of expressing form, position and 

 relation is by drawing. 



Often the simplest and quickest way to give pupils clear, sharp 

 ideas about the objects they are studying is to have them draw ob- 

 jects before reducing observations to writing. Drawing gives better 

 ideas of form and relation than can be obtained from a word descrip- 

 tion. 



Nature study will not succeed unless it is co-ordinated with other 

 studies. It should not and must not be pushed in as an extra, but 

 must be made the basis of much of the other work of the school. 

 Experience show's that when used in connection with language and 

 drawing it gives to these subjects a life and interest they never 

 before possessed. The study of nature forms a fitting introduction 

 to much of the most beautiful in literature. The opportunities for 

 connecting such work with geography are numberless. Through it 

 even arithmetic may have a new life infused into it. 



There are so many subjects in which the child must be tested, not 

 so much by standards within him, by which alone he can be fairly 

 judged as a child but as by standards without of arbitrary marking 

 and based on notions of scholarship. In these he must be held to 

 account from the start. But in nature study it is not so, at least on 

 its culture side — his free spirit should go untethered a longer time. 

 Of course his scientific house must be founded on a rock or the 

 floods will sweep it away, but tests of scholarly attainment need not 

 come till physics, chemistry or botany emerge as a separate study. 



Nature study is winning the schools and the children, but with 

 all the gain that it is making, there is still many a teacher who moves 

 along in the old narrow ruts as if the highway that leads up to her 

 school room door neA'er knew such a thing as the chipmunk's hide- 

 and-seek in the wall that borders it or the call of thie musical wood 

 thrush from the thicket hard by. 



"Whether we look, or whether we listen, 

 We hear life murmur, or see it glisten. 

 Every clod feels a stir of might, 



An instinct within that reaches and towers. 

 And, grasping blindly above it for light, 



Climbs to a soul in the grass and the flowers." 



