[FLETCHER | NATURE STUDY IN EDUCATION 153 
a beetle or a butterfly, a frog, a snake, or even a toad. Everything is 
worthy of study from many points of view, and has a multitude of men- 
tal uses and direct lessons to teach. 
The scope of Nature Study should as much as possible be con- 
fined to the simple elements of knowledge. It should not be taught 
to the scholar by the teacher, but studied by the teacher with the 
scholar, the teacher merely using his or her superior knowledge and 
experience in directing and encouraging the scholars to strive to learn 
for themselves from and of all things which come before them, in a 
word, to be self-dependent and not to trust too much to what they 
find in books written by others, but to examine and consider every- 
thing for themselves. 
There is beauty in everything, but to what an enormous extent 
is that beauty hidden from human eyes ! How many of us go through 
the world with our eyes open but seeing nothing, because the scales 
are still before our eyes and we have not yet learnt how to look for 
and to see the beauty illimitable which is waiting to be revealed ! 
Nature Study properly directed will teach us to want to see and to 
want to know about the thousand and one useful things which many 
people have not yet learnt that there is any use in even wanting to 
know about. But seeing is not all that Nature Study will teach ; for, 
by natural sequence, the mind will be stimulated and instinctively 
strive to arrive at accurate conclusions, which, being founded on per- 
sonal observations, will be held intelligently and with confidence. 
Another objection which has sometimes been advanced particu- 
larly by teachers who have not as yet taken part in this latest develop- 
ment of education, is that the curriculum of studies is now so full that 
there is no time for anything more. This objection is quite natural, 
for there is frequently danger in making a change ; but we know that 
all progress is change ; and, in the case of Nature Study, if it is sys- 
tematically undertaken, a very short time every day, ten or fifteen 
minutes taken from the school time, will suffice. It is no violent 
change that is suggested which would upset the old edifice of mental 
training, but, on the contrary, is a happy blending of recreation with 
the existing system of studies, by which the latter will be strengthened. 
The experience of a thousand years has proved the wisdom shown 
in the choice of subjects used in the training of boys and girls, and 
there is no desire to do away with any of these ; but the object of 
giving a boy a lesson in geography is not particularly to teach him 
where Timbuctoo or Kamtschatka, or Kilimanjaro, are situated ; nor 
in history is there any great use in his knowing and remembering in 
after life—as far as making a good and useful citizen is concerned— 
