No. 4.] NATURE STUDY. 211 



10. Her food is a mixed diet of seeds, fruits, insects, etc. 



11. Her lips are a horny bill. 



14. She breathes air by lungs, and her body is warm and 

 blood red. 



16. She has an inside, bony, jointed skeleton. (See a cooked 

 chicken.) 



You laugh at this, but if you had pledged yourselves to 

 renounce the delights of agriculture and to devote your 

 lives to the pursuit of science, you would weep instead. It 

 is such books as these that make science a by-word and a 

 laughing-stock the length and breadth of the land. They 

 have brought this newest attempt at natural education into 

 disgrace. " If this is what you call nature study," say the 

 common-sense people of the country, " let us cleave to the 

 three R's and to classical education." I heard only recently 

 of a superintendent in one of the rural districts of Massa- 

 chusetts who asked one of his schools to find out how a 

 frog winked, and tell him when he visited the school again. 

 He nearly lost his job, which, to nry thinking, speaks well for 

 rural Massachusetts. If that same superintendent had asked 

 the children to tell him how many insects a frog would take 

 for a dinner, I do not know of a farmer in the Common- 

 wealth that would have found any fault with the lesson. 



New York State and California have taken hold of nature 

 study more vigorously, perhaps, than any other States. 

 New York,, especially, has voted liberal appropriations for 

 its promulgation during the past five years. Other States 

 have naturally been holding back to learn the most approved 

 methods and the results. Only a few days since word has 

 come to me that the main argument that prevented the 

 adoption of a nature study book by one of the middle 

 States reading circles was, that nature stud}*- in New York 

 State and California had proved a failure. 



To save our schools from abject bookishness, to bring our 

 children into normal and healthful relations to nature, to re- 

 populate the rural districts and elevate the pursuit of agri- 

 culture, we need nature study as never before. And just 

 now, when the trolleys arc opening up the country in every 

 direction, good roads are being built, and the cityward tide 



