VALUE OF HORTICULTURAL EDUCATION. 33 



the colleges are making preparations for this kind of instruc- 

 tion. In fact, many of them have made very extensive prepara- 

 tions to teach the young men and also the young women who 

 will matriculate in the institutions of learning. But it seems 

 to me in that we are wrong; not in equipping our colleges for 

 this line of education, but waiting until they reach that age, be- 

 cause they have passed the period in life when they take an in- 

 tense interest in these things. For instance, the child, by 

 nature, likes this; she likes the plants, likes to see the insects 

 and watch them. They like to see the birds. They take an 

 interest in the things that have motion and that are active, and 

 in the plants first that show a degree of growth that is rapid; 

 that they can see the changes that take place. So the little 

 child by nature likes to watch the bud, if it is only a brief time, 

 until that bud developes into a full blown flower. That is the 

 nature of the child— the natural child; the unnatural child is 

 the one who has grown up to manhood or womanhood and gives 

 but a passing notice to these things. And it is because they 

 have been trained to it because they don't like it. Now the 

 truth is, we give a good deal of attention to mathematics when 

 the child is small. Tliey must learn to count the combination 

 of numbers; learn to compute early in life. That is the first 

 thing in life. The three R's was the first thing that must be 

 given the child. Now it seems to me that when the child is 

 young in years and wishes to handle bugs and living things, 

 either in plant or animal life, we ought to give most attention to 

 the development of these things which are natural to the child; 

 but instead of that we give the child abstract things, and the 

 child deals with abstract propositions. 



Now after a while we reach that age of the child when we 

 wish to reason from the known to the unknown. We wish to 

 study philosophy, chemistry and such sciences as that, and we 

 take an interest in geology possibly, and all that. Now when 

 they have reached that age of development, when they naturally 

 take hold of these sciences, we say to them, you must go back 

 and study plants, must study insects, and so we give them 

 college names, and we say you will study botony and plant 

 structure; you will study entomology and biology and those 

 sciences that the child by nature is prepared in early life to 



