CONNOLLY] READING OF THE BAROMETER 99 



children of Syrian Jews. They may accept the virus or they may 

 remain immune. And her innate maternal instinct, entirely 

 wrong as all instincts are when conditions change, will cause her 

 to devote all her time to the hopeless cases, to the infinite boredom 

 of such pupils as have native ability, and to her own nervous 

 undoing. She does this now in thirteen subjects, and hopes to 

 be spared a similar desecration of nature. 



The school official is to blame. So long as he demands certain 

 visible results he will get certain invisible concomitants. Just so 

 soon as he gets nature graded and distributed, so that he can 

 examine on it for promotion will the teacher show her usual 

 inventive ability in making of the subject a dead and deadening 

 drill. And if he spares nature, just so long as he examines and 

 promotes on other subjects nature will be neglected. 



Hence our courses of study are full of high sounding phrases 

 about the intellectual and moral values of the study of nature, and 

 our class rooms are too often devoid of its practice. 



There are, outside the school, two agencies which are ready to 

 cooperate with the nature study propaganda, and another which 

 has great potenialities for usefulness. The two agencies already 

 at work, and likely to do much more as soon as mutual confidence 

 becomes more general, are the museums and agencies such as 

 park commissions, zoos and aquaritims, botanic gardens, and the 

 like. The agency not yet involved, but ready for very valuable 

 usefulness, is the grange. 



At the last meeting of the American Museum Association there 

 was one session devoted to this subject, but no session was devoid 

 of it. It is the great center of musetim interest everywhere. 

 My pamphlet on the Educational Value of Museums published by 

 the Newark Museum, finds response from all parts of Europe, 

 even amid the present convulsions. And, though only two years 

 old, it is past history — so fast are museum activities among 

 children increasing. This is true of both Art and Science museums, 

 but the correlations of science with the work of the schools are 

 the more varied. 



This movement has not always — indeed has not preponderat- 

 ingly — begun with the schools. Would that it were so. The 

 proper sequence is for the schools to desire material for their 

 activ ties, and for the museums to respond. The museum too 

 often has to create its market. 



