252 HOW TO STUDY BIRDS 



whether mental training must be confined largely to 

 matters which few people care permanently about 

 and which after graduation are promptly forgotten. 

 Is there not as much intellectual stimulus in things 

 with a human interest, which really enter into the 

 natural furnishing of human life? People observe 

 that prices of staple goods are constantly soaring, 

 that agriculture is handicapped for want of men, and 

 yet that hosts of graduates, whether from city or 

 country, are overcrowding the professions and seden- 

 tary employments. There is more than a suspicion 

 that our past system of education somehow spoils 

 many people for their surroundings and fails to de- 

 velop them along the lines of their natural and proper 

 interests. If some say that only antiquities and phi- 

 losophies give properly sharpened intellects, it may 

 be an open question whether we are not overstocked 

 with that particular brand of intellect. The fact is 

 that we have been training all children alike for city 

 life, giving country children a prejudice against the 

 country. So we pay the penalty. 



Nature is so varied and wonderful that it would 

 be strange if there could be found no proper mental 

 training in knowing her many aspects and under- 

 standing her marvelous ways. This is an age of 

 science, and the comforts and advantages of our 

 modern civilization have come largely through studies 

 of nature, learning how to utilize her processes. It 

 is manifestly unfair to our children to equip them 

 with a purely scholastic outfit and leave them really 



