TRAINING FOR COUNTRY LIFE 29 



a strong smack of agriculture in them. No impression gained 

 retains so firm a hold upon a person's memory and thought as what 

 is imbibed in the cradle and assimilated automatically in early 

 infant life. 



Now, with reference to this point, our out-of-date land system 

 has handicapped us badly in comparison with our neighbours east 

 and west. Everywhere outside our own country rural children are 

 born to parents who have an exploitation of some sort, some little 

 husbandry of their own at their command. From that simple 

 husbandry the child instinctively extracts rudimentary agricultural 

 knowledge and acquires habits and a natural taste for rural life. 

 It cannot help observing what is going on around it. All that it 

 sees quite naturally impresses itself upon its plastic and retentive 

 mind. It learns to think " country " and to feel " agriculturally." 

 It sees the flowers and the vegetables developing, stage by stage, 

 the chicks growing. It has the whole process carried on in Nature's 

 laboratory placed before its eyes day by day, and hour by hour. 

 And that is one reason, among others, why, as Mr. J. Falconer 

 Wallace has deposed, in the course of our late agricultural inquiry, 

 a cottage garden is of greater value to our humble rural folk than an 

 allotment. It is so to the small man's wife, who rears her vegetables 

 in the garden. It is so to the family all round, because going to 

 the more or less distant allotment means a job. You come, work 

 and return. The garden is always handy at your very door. It 

 is available for every free five minutes of time. In it the mother 

 or the father works, or else rests. In it the child plays and learns 

 horticulture, agriculture, nature-study automatically, in its very 

 playing ; and in this way it learns, at any rate in a rudimentary 

 way, in their results to understand the wonders of which Job wrote. 

 And with its shadowy understanding naturally comes a love of 

 what it sees, and a taking for granted that these things are as they 

 should be. That understanding and that love grow as the infant 

 comes to take a hand in the work that has to be done. The work 

 becomes part of itself, and in this way a link is forged between the 

 little citizen of the world and its surroundings, which it needs a 

 power of some force to break. 



Most certainly that automatic learning of Nature loie wants to 

 be followed up more scientifically in school, where nature-study — 

 outside the schoolroom — ought in any case to be made to occupy 

 a foremost place in the programme of school training. 



The practical-minded Americans — both north and south of the 

 long border dividing the dominion from the republic — have known 



