19 00- 1901. ] Nature Study. 237 
“se 
eae 
and to exercise and develop the rudimentary faculties of 
research. ‘The teacher directs the natural impulses, and tries 
_to make them automatic so as to build up character, very 
} much as the gardener prunes and trains the tree that it may 
_ bear good fruit. There is fine insight in what Shakespeare 
_ wrote :— 
, 
q 
an 
“Yet nature is made better by no mean, 
But nature makes that mean : so, over that art, 
Which you say adds to nature, is an art 
That nature makes. 
HVE: This is an art 
Which does mend nature,—change it rather, but 
The art itself is nature.” 
—“The Winter’s Tale,” iv. 3. 
“Feed the young growing human being,” says Professor 
James, our present Gifford lecturer, “feed him with the sort 
of experience for which from year to year he shows a natural 
craving, and he will develop in adult life a sounder sort 
of mental tissue, even though he may be ‘wasting’ a great 
_ deal of his growing time in the eyes of those for whom 
the only channels are books and verbally communicated 
information.”* Sir John Gorst, in his address as president 
of the section of Education of the British Association, 
made some remarks worth remembering, coming as_ they 
do from so great an authority on educational affairs. “If 
children in village schools,” he said, “ spent less of their 
early youth in learning mechanically to read, write, and 
ipher, and more in searching hedgerows and ditch-bottoms 
for flowers, insects, and other natural objects, their intelli- 
gence would be developed by active research, and they 
‘would better learn to read, write, and cipher.” 
Nature study has been made to play an insignificant part 
our educational system, because the results cannot be 
mechanically determined by an examiner,—they cannot be 
‘Yeadily quantified and paid for according to the method 
long in vogue. The same difficulties were felt long before 
| the age of examinations and the compulsory teaching of the 
three R’s. Our spiritual guides in the National Church 
tried to introduce soul-sifting machines, known as confessions 
1 «Talks to Teachers,’ by Professor James, p. 148. 
