Professor Thomson's Address 125 



one, the advantages are obviously great, but I must 

 confess to some misgivings on the subject partly 

 based on twenty years of experimenting. These 

 misgivings have led me to restrict this brief paper to 

 an illustration of that method the seasonal method 

 which I have found to give the most encouraging 

 results. 



Allow me very shortly to hint at the nature of my 

 misgivings. 



I am afraid lest in our enthusiasm for Nature-study 

 we under-appreciate the difficulties of the problem 

 and the danger of doing the business badly. The 

 danger is a very real one; for while the teaching of 

 grammar, for instance, may be very bad indeed, one 

 never hears of serious ill-effects, whereas bad educa- 

 tion in nature-lore means a distortion of the child's 

 outlook on the world. Given a man or woman with 

 the mood of the naturalist a country school-master 

 who knows and loves the birds, a country school- 

 mistress who knows and loves the flowers then the 

 course of Nature-study, now compulsory, is sure to be 

 healthful. But given a teacher, who through over- 

 work, or preoccupation with other disciplines, or lack 

 of early training, is only coercively, not organically, 

 interested in nature-lore, then I should fear that the 

 results will be very bad indeed. To a certain extent 

 this badness is the Nemesis of trying to educate too 

 cheaply, of expecting too much from an underpaid 

 teacher with a niggardly allowance for class-material, 

 but this is surely curable; to a certain extent it must 

 be the result of asking a teacher to instruct in a sub- 

 ject which he has never really learned, but this is 

 being rapidly cured ; to a certain extent it is the 



