240 Nature Study. [Sess. 
in an interesting way. A number of these lie on the table. 
I showed some of these tracts to a young lady, a member of 
this Society, who has studied very thoroughly Kindergarten 
methods, and her criticism of them struck me as particularly 
to the point. She said they were got up far too evidently 
to coach the teacher. This applies to English as well as 
American nature study tracts. The aim of the movement 
is most praiseworthy, but, it must be confessed, by no means 
easy to accomplish, because teachers in public schools on 
both sides of the Atlantic are already an overworked body, 
and teaching nature study above all things must be sympa- 
thetic and not mechanical, and for that a certain amount 
of leisure is essential. 
Here I should mention an article which appeared in Apple- 
ton’s ‘ Popular Science Monthly’ for February 1898, which 
showed that a good deal was being done in the way of what 
I might call economic nature study. I shall quote a few 
sentences from the article. “In 1890 there were nearly 
8000 school gardens—gardens for practical instruction in 
rearing trees, vegetables, and fruits—in Austria.” “In France 
gardening is practically taught in 28,000 primary and ele- 
mentary schools, each of which has a garden attached to it, 
and is under the care of a master capable of imparting a 
practical knowledge of horticulture.” Similar arrangements 
exist in Sweden. “ Still more significant is the establishment 
of many school gardens in Southern Russia.” Out of 500 
schools in one province, about one-half have school gardens of 
fully an acre each, and this movement has widely spread over 
Central Russia.! 
To sum up what I have already said: nature study—or, 
to use the new word, the heuristic method—is the phylo- 
genetic method; it is the path the race has pursued in ad- 
vancing from palolithic times to the present, from ignorance 
1 Tt is curious to note what a change in men’s views of education has taken 
place in little more than a century. Dr Samuel Johnson thought education as 
needful for the ‘‘ embellishments of life.” ‘‘ The truth is,” he says, ‘‘ that know- 
ledge of external nature and the sciences which that knowledge requires are not 
the great or the frequent business of the human kind” (‘‘ Life of Milton”’). In ve ry 
much the same spirit Rousseau wrote: ‘‘ Le pauvre n’a pas besoin d’éducation,” 
—he means of books; ‘“‘celle de son état est forcée; il n’en sauroit avoir 
d’autre” (‘ Emile,’ i.) ‘ 
