REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE OF EDUCATION 251 



It occurs to us also to suggest that now and then our state experiment 

 stations might quite legitimately devote a bulletin to conservation. 



II. WORK IN THE SCHOOLS. 



While the community as a whole is receiving such suggestions as are 

 possible through the agencies mentioned — lectures, addresses, newspaper 

 articles, books and pamphlets — there is a vastly more effective means at 

 our disposal in the public schools, dealing as they do with no less than 

 twenty millions of children. We suggest that teachers everywhere be 

 urged to include in all the studies that pertain to nature something in 

 regard to the preservation of natural objects. This need not be much in 

 amount, and it should be brought in with care and wisdom. We are 

 reminded that once a very good cause was much discredited in the 

 schools by the rash unwisdom of its advocates w^ho insisted upon such 

 an overdose of advice and admonishment that acute nausea resulted. So 

 we would suggest that in the following studies care should be taken on 

 the one hand to suggest conservation while on the other hand still 

 greater care should be taken not to overdo the matter. 



(a) Nature Study. Along with an appreciation of nature there 

 should be inculcated the feeling that others after us should have the 

 opportunity of enjoying the same beauties that we have. 



(b) Geography. As now generally presented, this deals more with 

 the earth and what it contains than with its political divisions. Thus 

 the soil, the forest cover, the streams, the water supply, all fall within 

 this rejuvenated science, and here most readily can be inculcated the prin- 

 ciples of conservation, as applied to the soil, the forests, the streams, 

 and the underground waters. 



(c) Botany. When the pupil's attention is more specifically drawn 

 to the plant covering of the earth, in the study of botany, it is not at all 

 difficult to impress upon him the desirability of preserving the vegeta- 

 tion of the present day for the generations that are to come after us. 

 No lover of plants can contemplate with pleasure the thought that for 

 the botanists of the twenty-first century certain curious orchids, some 

 rare trees, and possibly some golden rods, may be as completely extinct 

 as are the paleozoic calamites and lepidodendrids. The latter perished 

 from the face of the earth, and we know of them now only by the frag- 

 ments that have been preserved in the fossils which we dig up from the 

 old rocks. Extinction has been the fate of many a plant, and extinction 

 of plants now living is by no means improbable. The botanical teacher 

 should preach the doctrine of preservation, the preservation of the plants 

 of the present for the people who come after us. 



(d) Zoology. So, too, the teacher of zoology should improve his 

 opportunity to help create a feeling favorable to the conservation of the 

 present animal life. Especially do we need a propaganda of conserva- 

 tion in relation to the birds of the country. And here we remark that 

 there are methods of presenting this part of zoology which emphasize 

 rather the living bird in the tree than the dead bird in the cabinet. 



