Winter Meeting. 249 



connected with every rural school. England, Norway, Sweden, 

 indeed, almost every country of Europe, either by law or custom, 

 has established the school garden, and we, who pride ourselves up- 

 on being enterprising and progressive, are lagging sadly behind. 

 Is it partly because we are so busy improving our machines that we 

 forget what is far more important, the improvement of the thinkers 

 behind them? 



The older nations, the Japanese, the Chinese, the Orientals 

 generally, have eyes and fingers trained to tasks utterly impossible 

 to us, minds trained to receptiveness and retentiveness to us un- 

 known. We are awakening, in some degree, to our deficiency, and 

 the improvement is beginning to show in our schools. 



The day of indiscriminate cramming of facts into a child's 

 mind is passing ; we are trying not only to put in, but to draw out. 

 It has been said there has been too much involution, not enough 

 evolution. In the hoped-for evolution, the school garden will play an 

 important part. 



Boston was the pioneer in the United States; here the first 

 work, and some of the best, has been done under the Massachusetts 

 Horticultural Society, the Massachusetts Civic League and other 

 societies, among them some of the women's clubs. The largest 

 garden in the country is carried on by the National Cash Register 

 Co. of Dayton, Ohio. This is a business corporation in which sen- 

 timent plays no part, and its endorsement of such work speaks vol- 

 umes for its utility. Eleven years ago this garden was laid out; it 

 has grown from 40 plots of ground to over 70. A man who is 

 thoroughly acquainted with the experiment and its results, says 

 that the children develop 30 per cent, more rapidly, morally, men- 

 tally and physically than if they were kept strictly to their ordinary 

 school work. 



In the garden they are taught the composition of the soil by the 

 disintegration of rocks and mixture of organic matter; of the chem- 

 ical elements necessary to plant life, and how they are obtained ; of 

 the effects of the atmosphere, of light, heat and moisture ; the way 

 to prepare the ground for various vegetables or flowers ; what ones 

 can be raised at different seasons, and how they should be treated, 

 and all the processes of nature involved in the production and 

 growth of plant life. 



They are taught of the insects that are helpful or harmful, and 

 how best to combat the pests. When we consider the amount of 

 agricultural produce annually destroyed in this country by insects, 

 one authority says four hundred million dollars' worth, whether he 



