EDITORIAL 359 



intentionally educative aims the easier it will become to employ 

 twenty or thirty minutes daily in the school-room upon the educa- 

 tive consideration of such experience. 



This principle shows the way in which the experimental sciences 

 may serve nature-study and reciprocally the nature-study method 

 ma}- .- react faA'orably upon the formal science teaching. Ex- 

 president Ehot has said that in spite of his former very contrary 

 opinion he had come to regard much of the experimental work in 

 physics and chemistry as httle better for scientific education than 

 studying columns of a dictionary would be forEnglish composition. 



Phenomena and activities treated of in text-books of physics 

 and chemistry come within the experience of children. They are 

 often very interesting and so far as the causes and effects involved 

 can be understood by them, they ought to be given a place in the 

 nature-study work. So the need or the opportunity for such 

 lessons rises in the pupils' experience either according to or regard- 

 less of the teacher's plan. The pupils with a clear idea of the 

 phenomenon or problem in mind should have a share in the 

 devisement of appliances for its elucidation and be guided in 

 discovering, if possible, the truths demonstrated in the success or 

 failure as the case may be of each step in the experience. 



For example — it is desired to remove the sediment from a fish- 

 globe or aquarium without disturbing the algae on or near the sur- 

 face. The teacher will interest the pupils in the problem and set 

 them thinking to invent means of working it out. Drawing the 

 sedimentary layer off with a rubber tubing may be proposed and 

 thus the siphon is introduced. In the making and using of this 

 apparatus, proposals are accepted, discussed and tried. Measures 

 that the teacher may know will be unsuccessful are, unless dis- 

 proved by the children's own di-ductions, tried out as faithfully as 

 those that the teacher expects will succeed; for educational pur- 

 poses such failures may be the greatest successes. 



When interest in the action of the siphon as a machine is aroused 

 desire will be excited to know, why the water runs uphill, why it 

 runs faster as the delivery end is lowered, why it ceases to run at 

 the point when it is level with the water in the vessel, why the 

 heavier sediment moves to the entrance of the siphon and rises in 

 it, etc. Each of these obser^^ations and experiences becomes in 

 turn a "need" for a new lesson or an extension of some phase of the 

 old one. John Dearness. 



