124 NATURE STUDY AND LIFE 



if we see a chickadee in winter going through his trapeze 

 performances as he picks out the little black eggs from 

 behind the buds, we feel like encouraging his presence 

 in every way we can. He becomes thenceforth an inter- 

 esting friend of ours for life. And so it is with a thousand 

 other things. Knowledge lives and grows, if we have this 

 common ground, these fundamental interests, about which 

 to group our otherwise unrelated observations. Lacking 

 this, everything falls apart, and the whole becomes a 

 chaotic, unorganized affair. Adults may be able to form 

 more abstract, idealized relations with nature, but even 

 this is rare, and we cannot hope to establish them whole- 

 sale with children. 



|The garden thus becomes not only a vital part j of a 

 child's education in itself, but the great center, the heart 

 of vitalizing influences and interests that radiate into 

 nature in every direction. 



The status of children demands a thorough revival of this 

 work. In the first place, children of native New England 

 parentage are becoming very few. Our vital statistics are 

 complicated by foreign immigration ; but it is probably 

 safe to say that in our strictly native New England popu- 

 lation there are more deaths than births. We often 

 hear France alluded to in this connection, but official 

 statistics for New Hampshire (1892) show that to every 

 1000 inhabitants there are 19.1 births and 20.1 deaths. 

 In France the ratio is 22.1 births to 22.6 deaths. As 

 a whole, New England stands third lowest, 24.9 birth 

 rate per 1000 population ; France, 22.1 ; Ireland, 22.4 ; 

 Germany, 35.7; Hungary, 40.3; and, despite her lower 

 death rate, she stands also third lowest in increase of 



