n6 First Conference 



What have I wondered at, questioned, and inter- 

 preted for myself? Then let us put these positive 

 personal experiences together. We shall thus learn 

 not merely much of what we have individually missed 

 and lost, but how we may unite our respective advan- 

 tages, and thus make up a more full and generous 

 nature-curriculum for ordinary schools and ordinary 

 children than even most professed naturalists, perhaps 

 any, have ever had. Let me try then to open such a 

 pooling and co-operation of personal experiences by 

 the very briefest summary of my own, which have 

 been going on happily year by year since early child- 

 hood, and this generally with the diversified interests 

 of the old-fashioned geographer- naturalist, of the 

 general educationist, rather than with the intense 

 and lifelong concentration of the specialist upon any 

 single group of phenomena. Yet to appreciate the 

 essentials of many aspects of nature, to seek for their 

 respective bearing on education and on social life, is 

 in its way a special inquiry also; and the one which 

 most concerns us here. 



Let each of us then examine himself, and try to 

 recall such autobiographic details as he can, of 

 nature -awakening in childhood, then of widening 

 experience in later boyhood or girlhood, with also 

 too often its deadening and starving and stunting 

 also. Next let us call up the intellectual, emotional, 

 artistic, poetic arousal and uplift of adolescence ; and 

 then, and only then, such advantages as we may have 

 had in higher education or in later life. Personally, 

 then, my own autobiographic record runs back through 

 many of the great aspects of Nature to homely and 

 simple ones. It is good to have been among the 



