216 STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



would be a great help to them in maintaining order. Their self interest 

 would incline them to it. Simple experiments, like the germination of seeds, 

 can be carried on indoors in any weather. He advocated the school garden 

 and the oral teaching of botany. As school inspector of his township, he 

 found not one of the thirteen teachers who knew the names of the plants the 

 children put into the vases. It is the province of our society to insist upon 

 this instruction, and persevere to success. 



Prof. Bailey — Germination is the beginning of horticultural study, and is 

 very interesting, and full of possibilities of good. 



Dr. Manly Miles, of Lansing, reminded that they must first get the teacher. 

 They had advocated bringing in horticulture for oral instruction only, and 

 that is the hardest kind of teaching. He spoke of the bad mental equipment 

 of some students he had known who had graduated from teachers who knew 

 nothing of physiology, for instance, but what was within text book covers. 



Prof. Daniels, ex-superintendent of Grand Kapids public schools, read a 

 paper upon 



HORTICULTURAL INSTRUCTION IN KINDERGARTENS, 



PREPARED BY MISS LILLY JONES, OF GRAND RAPIDS. 



Frederick Froebel called his institution an infant garden (kindergarten) 

 because he thought it necessary that a garden should be connected with it; 

 and because he wished symbolically to indicate by this name, that children 

 resemble the plants of a garden, and should be treated with similar care. He 

 considered no such institution perfect unless it had a patch of ground 

 sufficiently krge so each child could have a small garden for himself. This 

 is especially wanting at the present time, when kindergartens have multi- 

 plied and spread over all the globe. 



Wherever this new education has been introduced it has to contend with 

 very defective arrangements. Private dwelling-houses, workshops, stores, 

 even abandoned breweries — as has often been the case in England — have 

 been utilized for this purpose. The garden or cultivated open space is what 

 is especially lacking. 



In Froebel's kindergarten the children could be seen digging in the soil, 

 throwing up mounds, and little by little making themselves small gardens 

 of their own. At first the little spade that accompanied the child out of 

 doors was only used for heaping up sand and stones as an exercise of strength 

 without aim. As soon, however, as any power of observation had begun to 

 supplement the merely instinctive movements, there was awakened an 

 impulse to till the ground and to make use of the productive force of 

 nature ; thus the child in its play and man in the earliest stages of civiliza- 

 tion seeks to obtain better and more plentiful nourishment. Even though 

 the instinct which moves the child to enclose its little garden with sticks be 

 an undefined one, it is, nevertheless, that out of which the science of agri- 

 culture has arisen — the instinct or need of possession. Practical doing 

 awakens love and thought, and sympathy with nature is intensified. 

 Dependence is realized through waiting for the result of work. 



The following incident is told by the Baroness Marenholz-Bulow, the 

 most devout of FroebeFs co-workers: Two little girls, four and five years 

 old, had in the kindergarten a garden, where, like the other children, they 

 had planted a few peas and beans. Every day they dug them up to see why 



