76 NATURE STUDY. 



Nature Study Lessons. IV. 



BY EDWARD J. BURN HAM. 



Children find a keen pleasure in details. It is not al- 

 wa};s, or commonly, a mere delight in destruction that im- 

 pels a child to take his toy apart or pull a flower in pieces. 

 There are ever so manj' things that he wants to know, and 

 he takes his own way to find out. He proceeds by analy- 

 sis — one of the best ways in the world, if properly direct- 

 ed ; but he needs intelligent suggestion to enable him to 

 perceive the significance of what he finds. Merely to 

 pluck the petals of a flower is one thing ; to discover that 

 certain flowers always have five petals is quite another. 

 Save for the purpose of classification, the fact is not very 

 important of itself, but the value of the power to make such 

 an observation cannot be over-estimated. 



Most grown people see the objects about them in only a 

 general way. The faculty of observ^ation which they pos- 

 sessed in childhood, instead of being developed, has in a 

 large measure been lost. They habitually overlook de- 

 tails in nature and in art. Not one in ten, scarcely one in 

 a hundred persons, having seen a landscape or a statue, 

 can describe it so that by the description it can be distin- 

 guished from landscapes and statues in general. They 

 lack the faculty of taking note of details ; and yet the pos- 

 session or the lack of this faculty has a very practical bear- 

 ing upon the conduct of human affairs. Many of the ac- 

 cidents and annoyances of life are directly due to want of 

 observation, to say nothing of the pleasure to be derived 

 from the exercise of a facultj^ which is so common as to be 

 wellnigh universal among children, but which is too often 

 lost through neglect in maturer years. 



Yet this faculty of observation is easily developed and re- 

 tained through exercise, and it does not matter greatly 



