THE INTEGUMENT-MAN 41 



sane man wishes to cheapen or discourage the 

 teaching of science. Nature-study is not opposed 

 to it. Nature-study prepares the child to receive 

 the science-teaching. Gradually, as the child 

 matures, nature-study may grow into science- 

 learning if the child so elect. Science-teaching 

 has more to fear from desiccated science-teaching 

 than it has from nature-study. Everything that 

 is true and worth the while will endure. 



All youths love nature. None of them, 

 primarily, loves science. They are interested in 

 the things that they see. By and by they begin 

 to arrange their knowledge and impressions of 

 these things, and thereby to pursue a science. 

 The idea of the science should come late in the 

 educational development of the youth, for the 

 simple reason that science is only a human way 

 of looking at a subject. There is no natural 

 science, but there has arisen a science of natural 

 things. At first the interest in nature is an affair 

 of the heart, and this attitude should never b 

 stifled, much less eliminated. When the interest 

 passes from the heart to the head nature-love has 

 given way to science. Fortunately, it can always 

 remain an affair of the heart with a most perfect 

 engraftment of the head, but the teaching of 

 facts alone tends to divorce the two. When we 

 begin the teaching of the youth by the teaching 

 of a science we are inverting the natural order. 

 A rigidly graded and systematic body of facts 

 kills nature-study ; examinations bury it. 



Then teach! If you love nature and have 



