1903] Nature Study — No. 7. 145 



NATURE STUDY— No. VII. 



It is the Spirit Which Gives it Effect. 

 G. U. Hay, D. Sc, Editor " Educational Review," St. John, N.B. 



So many children leave school at the age of ten or twelve, 

 or even earlier, that it is important to have a well devised plan of 

 nature-study for the elementary schools. Every healthy child is 

 an observer of his surroundings. Before he enters school at 

 all, he is familiar with a great number of material objects, and 

 his questions show that he has thought about them. How 

 important it is then to cultivate this attitude of the child toward 

 his surroundings, lead him to acquire the habits of a naturalist, 

 to find joys, as he grows older, in the country lanes and meadows 

 — ^joys often denied to those who have superior mental equipment 

 but who have not "eyes to see." Happy are the children who 

 have parents and teachers intelligent, sympathetic and enthusias- 

 tic, who will enter with zest into the child's happy world, and will 

 illustrate the lessons in reading and arithmetic, geography, 

 history and drawing, by materials drawn from the child's own 

 environment and resources. 



In the charming story of "En Glad Gut" (A Happy Boy) 

 by Biornson, the famous dramatist and novelist of Norway, 

 Oyvind, the hero of the story, is shown at home in the world of 

 nature around him. " His mother came out and sat down by his 

 side. He wanted to hear stories of what was far away. So she 

 told him how once everything could talk : the mountain talked to 

 the stream, and the stream to the river, the river to the sea and the 

 sea to the sky. But then he asked if the sky did not talk to anyone. 

 And the sky talked to the clouds, the clouds to the trees, and the 

 trees to the grass, the grass to the flies, the flies to the animals, 

 the animals to the children, the children to the grown up people ; 

 and so it went on until it had gone round ; and no one could tell 

 where it had begun. Oyvind looked at the mountain, the trees, 

 the sky, and had never really seen them before." 



And "the mountain talked to the stream." Now what did 

 the mountain say to the stream, any curious boy or girl will ask ? 

 Did it not say : I have pushed my cool head into the misty 

 clouds, and gathered around it the drops of moisture which give 



