MEANING OF NATURE-STUDY 35 



came from a country teacher who said that because 

 she had used it her pupils were no longer ashamed 

 of being farmers' children. If only that much 

 can be accomplished for each country child, the 

 result will be enough for one generation. What 

 can be done for the country child can be done, in 

 a different sphere, for the city child. Fifty years 

 hence the harvest will be seen. 



The nature-study effort sets our thinking in the 

 direction of our daily doing. It relates the school- 

 room to the life that the child is to lead. It 

 makes the common and familiar affairs seem to 

 be worth the while. Essentially, it is not an 

 ideal for the school any more than it is for the 

 home ; but so completely do we delegate all work 

 of teaching and instructing to the school, that 

 nature-study effort comes to be, in practice, a 

 school-room subject. I wish that every parent, 

 as well as every professional teacher, could see 

 the importance of first instructing the child in 

 the very things that it is doing and the very objects 

 that it is seeing. The ideal of the parent or the 

 teacher should be to bring the child into sympa- 

 thetic relations with its world ; but whatever may 

 be in the mind and hope of the teacher, so far as 

 the child is concerned the nature-sympathy must 

 come as a natural effect of actual observation of 

 definite objects and phenomena. 



If, in conclusion, I were asked for a condensed 

 statement of the nature-study idea, I should choose 

 the following definition of it by Professor Thomas 

 H. Macbride, of the University of Iowa: **I 



