Professor Geddes's Address 115 



yet without losing touch with the whole. Nature is 

 thus the ultimate teacher and examiner, no less than 

 examinee. 



In the school of nature even more than in that of 

 books we may thus measure our progress, literally 

 year by year, at once in expanding knowledge, yet 

 in widening unattainable perspectives in developing 

 skill of observing, power of interpreting, yet also in 

 an increasing sense of the riddle of evolution, the 

 unfathomed mystery of life. But the practical 

 teacher, his official heads and organizers and critics 

 also, his children and parents too, demand some 

 tolerably definite guidance, some general method of 

 gradation, say rather some inclined plane of progress, 

 leading on year by year to this higher and fuller 

 vision, this stronger and clearer grasp. Yet how 

 shall we do this, avoiding as we must that formu- 

 lating, codifying, freezing, fossilizing process which 

 has befallen too many living educational movements 

 ere now? Two methods here suggest themselves; 

 both simple, almost trivial for the first is but the 

 observation of the child's progress, the second is but 

 the recalling of one's own. Yet after all, the latter is 

 the history of the individual best known to us; the 

 former an abridged recapitulation for the race. 



Here in this exhibition we have taken the work, 

 not of professed naturalists, but of little children, and 

 set it in the midst, and we visit it to learn from them. 

 For the rest, let each teacher examine himself. Let 

 him ask, What have been my own facilities for Nature- 

 study at different phases of life and study? How 

 may I now repeat these and increase them for my 

 pupils? What have I personally seen and enjoyed? 



