10 



While suggesting and pleading for these 

 things, 1 am met with the inquiry, Of 

 what use? With all our school advan- 

 tages, why crowd the minds of the young 

 with more? especially as we are told that 

 our youth are crowded and overtaught. 

 Why add to their labors by these studies, 

 so nearly outside of their school duties? 

 With all school work and its methods I 

 have no controversy. I know, of course, 

 that such instruction is and must be only 

 preparatory to any scientific training. What 

 we would do here is to supplement the 

 work of the school by bringing the minds 

 of the pupils into direct relation with 

 facts; that they should not merely be 

 told a thing which they must memorize, 

 but made to see, by the use of their own 

 intellectual powers, that the thing is so 

 and can not be otherwise. This is the 

 great advantage in the pursuit of any 

 scientific study, and particularly an the 

 pursuit of natural history, enabling the 

 student to draw conclusions from partic- 

 ular facts made kno\ATi to him by im- 

 mediate observation of nature. This is 

 a discipline which prepares the young for 

 the duties and pleasures of common life; 

 what we have to meet, and what we 

 have to do in our every-day life. In this 

 work-a-day world nearly everything which 

 demands our attention is matter of fact, 

 and needs, in the first place, to be accu- 

 rately observed or apprehended, and then 

 to be interpreted by processes of reason- 

 ing. I mean that whatever the youth 

 takes for granted he takes at his risk. 



In the study of mathematics the teach- 

 er starts with a few propositions, the 

 proof of which is obvious. Nearly all that 

 follows consists of deductions from these 

 propositions. The teaching of language 

 is of a very similar nature. In history 

 the facts are still taken at second-hand. 

 You can not make the pupil see the Bat- 

 tle of Bunker ITill or the Landing of the 

 Pilgrims. There is no getting in actual 

 contact with fact. The pupil must rest 

 entirely on the authority of the teacher. 

 There is no dispensing with it. 



Not so in the teaching of natural his- 

 tory. An effort is always made to make 

 the instruction eminently practical. In 



explaining the phenomena of nature the 

 teacher as far as possible, gives reality 

 to his instruction by object lessons. In 

 teaching botany the pupil sees the plant 

 in its native habitat, in all its stages of 

 growth and development; he handles it, 

 dissects and analyzes it, and thus learns 

 by actual contact its whole natural his- 

 tory. In teaching mineralogy the pupil 

 must, as far as possible, see the mineral 

 in its native bed, and when it comes 

 to the class-room he must handle it, 

 weigh it, try to fuse it, observe its color 

 and arrangement of particles, and its den- 

 sity and hardness, and so become thor- 

 oughly familiarized with it. 



If we pursue this subject carefully and 

 conscientiously, you may be sure that, 

 however scanty our means, we shall have 

 established an intellectual habit of great 

 value in the affairs of daily life. 



We observe liere that the young are 

 constantly seeking information about the 

 world around them. They want an ob- 

 ject lesson in natural history. The means 

 are always at hand in lavish profusion. 

 The need is only to find competent in- 

 structors who are willing to give this 

 amount of help, instructors who 

 really and practically know and 

 understand what they attempt to 

 teach. Such instructors I know (we have 

 had them here), who clothe their subjects 

 in easy language, and with the complete- 

 ness of conviction, with which they talk 

 of any ordinary every-day matter, who are 

 so perfectly at home in the subject-mat- 

 ter of their theme that they fascinate their 

 hearers with a lively confidence, born of 

 personal conviction, which cheers and en- 

 courages the inquiring and waiting pupil. 



Until Avithin a comparatively recent 

 time education has been devoted mainly 

 to the cultivation of the power of ex- 

 pression and to the sense of literary 

 beauty. If, instead of this, natural science 

 were made the foundation of education 

 rather than a pretence of embellishment, 

 a much better state of things would exist. 



In speaking as I do of the necessity 

 and value of natural science, I do not 

 lose sight of the work now of late being 

 done in the common schools, in what is 



