INTRODUCTION 



As a means of studying nature in most of its many 

 forms, there is, perhaps, nothing better than the 

 camera. Not only does it teach us to see much that 

 would otherwise pass unnoticed, but it enables us to 

 make records of what we see records that are, as a 

 rule, infinitely better and more useful than pencil 

 notes ; and the studying and photographing of one 

 subject leads to another, and so we go from birds to 

 insects, from insects to flowers, and from flowers to 

 trees, until we have an acquaintance with things 

 natural more intimate and far broader in its scope 

 than would have resulted had we been content simply 

 to try to see things and write notes on them. 



Nowadays, when every school has or should have 

 its nature class, we find children scarcely out of the 

 kindergarten who know more about our wild birds 

 and flowers than the great majority of the grown-up 

 people to whom nature study was an unknown thing 

 when they were young. To foster this desire in 

 children to know more of the life about them is 



