No. 4.] NATUKE STUDY. 207 



the feet and wings of animals. The chicken foot and wing, the 

 simplest structures of this kind, were prepared by lowest primary 

 or second-year pupils. . . . 



Where a school has a skeleton of a dog, the subject of bones 

 may be taught almost as well as if it were the skeleton of a man 

 instead. I have known pupils to become so enthusiastic in the 

 study of bones that on Saturday a knot of boys would gather in 

 some grove or meadow to boil a dead animal for next week's study. 

 For many useful hints in regard to work with bones, I am very 

 greatly indebted to Dr. . 



Here we have a half-baked medical student, himself doubt- 

 less enthusiastic in his anatomical studies, putting work that 

 belongs in a medical college into the primary grades of a 

 public school, under the name of " nature study," — a sin- 

 gle case, which shows the present chaotic state of our ele- 

 mentary science teaching. 



Take another more recent book, " Nature Study and the 

 Child/' — a most attractive title. It comes to us from one 

 of the foremost normal schools of the Empire State. It con- 

 tains 618 pages of fine print, and represents a complete 

 system of what the author would have us consider ' ' nature 

 study " is in its relation to the child and elementary educa- 

 tion. The book begins well : — 



& 



" Flower in the crannied wall, 

 I pluck you out of the crannies ; 

 Hold you here, root and all, in my hand, 

 Little flower; but if I could understand 

 What you are, root and all, and all in all, 

 I should know what God and man is." 



The chapter ends well, — 37 pages further on, — with 

 the same quotation. The author then proceeds to learn 

 "root and all, and all in all," with the most wooden ven- 

 geance. He digs up a dandelion, and begins with the root. 

 After describing this in detail which would do credit to an 

 instructor of college botany, he says : — 



We describe the dandelion root as a tap-root, cylindrical or con- 

 ical, exogenous, containing a milky liquid. 



