106 IOWA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES. 



class to work collecting. Any boy that is old enough to go to college is old 

 enough to handle a gun, and there are natural collectors in almost any class. 

 It may be a survival from savage' life, but a boy who does not like to hunt 

 is a rare and abnormal specimen. The boys will provide specimens, or 

 some resident farmer's lad will gladly scour the woods and secure birds at a 

 few cents each. After the instructor has given a few preliminary lectures 

 on the general character of animals, Vertebrata, Aves, the external parts of 

 birds, he is ready to instruct them on field work, and spend a half Saturday 

 with the class in the woods, each person armed with his field note book and 

 two or three armed with shot guns. Jordan's "Manual" can be used in identi- 

 fication of specimens. But there is a distinct danger in the use of manuals, 

 or rather in a sort of slavish adherence to them. The manual is intended 

 simply as a means of identification usually by purely superficial characters, 

 and its unrestricted use is apt to give undue prominence to these characters 

 in the mind of the student, while other facts of fundamental significance are 

 allowed to pass unnoticed. The manual should be supplemented by some 

 more extensive work of reference such as Baird, Brewer and Ridgway's. 



Give a specimen to each student, if there are enough to go around, or let 

 several work together on one specimen. It is by no means enough for the 

 student to simply identify the specimen, for he should learn all he can about 

 the habits, distribution, etc., of the species represented, and report all these 

 facts to the class for general discussion and comment by the instructor. 

 Certain specimens will furnish texts for special lectures on such subjects of 

 general interest as protective coloration, migration, secondary sexual char- 

 acters, rudimentary organs, adaptive structures, mimicry, nesting habits, 

 etc. Such talks will seldom fail to secure the attention of the class when 

 brought in in reference to some specimen recently secured and studied. 

 The instructor will often make the unexpected discovery that whole animals 

 and live animals are often fully as interesting to bright boys and girls as 

 animals which have been teezed with the needles or cut up with the micro- 

 tome. 



Two lectures a week, upon which full notes are taken and copied in per- 

 manent form, two hours devoted to field work, two to preparation of speci- 

 mens, and two to identification and study, will fill up the time in a manner 

 which will give variety to the work, exercise to the body, induce habits of 

 observation and discrimination, and bring the student into direct contact 

 with Nature. What more can we expect to accomplish in the time usually 

 allotted to zoology in our smaller colleges? The best ornithologists that we 

 have became so by this vei-y method of field work, combined with the con- 

 sequent identification and study of specimens and recording of observa- 

 tions. 



Year after year the cabinet will become more and more complete, and the 

 gaps in the series less and less conspicuous, until the local fauna will be well 

 worked up for publication, when both class and instructor will feel that they 

 have actually contributed something to the sum of human knowledge. The 

 true spirit of the naturalist which has lain dormant in many a boy and girl, 

 will be awakened to life and healthful activity; thanks to the teacher who 

 wisely introduces them to Natui'e at first hand, without the dreary inter- 

 vention of the text book and the disheartening task of learning pollysylla- 

 bic "classifications which have nothing to do with real knowledge." 



