424 



Junior Naturalist jNIonthly. 



All the many things in this world of ours may be placed in two great 

 groups. Things that are living or remains of things that have once had 

 life and things that have never had life. There is a great difiference 

 between the two. 



Those things that have had life must also have known death, and 

 are now in a process of decay — wasting or fading away, probably to 

 appear again in some new form of life. That which has never had life 

 is practically the same in structure now as it was a thousand years ago. 

 A stone that a century ago may have been as big as a meeting-house may 

 now be broken into pieces some of them as small as pin heads and the 

 pieces may be widely scattered, but each tin^ piece keeps the same char- 

 acter as had the big rock. It cannot die, for it never had a life to 

 give up. 



Your teacher can make an interesting contest by asking each of you 

 to see who can write out the longest list of organic and inorganic 

 substances. I once knew a man who learned to make such classification 

 many years after he had left school. When he read or heard the word 



the 

 throusjh 



would run tnrougn his 

 mind, " Had organs, there- 

 fore had life." When he 

 read or heard the word 

 " inorganic " the thought 

 would come, " Never had 

 organs, never had life." He 

 remembered that the pre- 

 fix " in " meant " not." At 

 this time he has heard the 

 words so often and is now 

 using them in his own 

 speech and writing that the 



organic 



thought 



&. 



*»«««ii. 



Fig. 2. — The boy professor. Now add fourteen two meanings come to him 

 ■parts of ivater. ^^.^^^^ ^^^^ ^^.^^.^1^ without the 



peculiar translation of which 1 have spoken. 



Since writing the above I have been leaning back in my chair, won- 

 dering whether you now have the meaning of the two words, organic 

 (once had life) and inorganic (never had life) so clearly and well placed 

 in your minds that I may now use the terms and you will not in any 

 way lose the sense of what I am trying to say. 



The plan of grouping things into families saves much time and 

 thought and aids to a clearer uirlerstanding. It is something like going 

 cross-lots. It is called classification. We will talk more about it by- 

 and-by. 



