212 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Pub. Doc. 



is beginning to set back toward the New England hill farms. 

 The dark day for the farm is past. The future is bright 

 with hope, and what we need now is that public education 

 shall do its part, shall equip the people who go back to the 

 farm with genuine knowledge of the resources of nature at 

 their command. Whether we shall call this instruction 

 nature study or some other name, agriculture or horticul- 

 ture, remains to be determined. But nature study is too 

 good a name to abandon to the enemy. To me, nature 

 study means more than agriculture or horticulture or ele- 

 mentary science, and it is more than all these combined. 



In line with what was said at the opening of this paper, 

 nature study should embody the fundamental relations and 

 achievements that mankind has attained in the past, together 

 with all that modern science is able to contribute which 

 touches these fundamental matters. We saw that even the 

 gods, Osiris, Demeter and Saturn, were agricultural gods. 

 Moral and social virtues centred about the possessions which 

 man produced from the soil. The very conception of home 

 and country, with all that love of home and country has 

 come to mean to civilized man, has sprung directly from 

 man's relations to the soil. Governments and laws, the sta- 

 bility of the home in the marriage relation, the best social 

 usages and customs, much of our finest literature, esthetic 

 development in the creation of beautiful gardens to surround 

 the home, — all these have grown up around man's relations 

 to mother earth. Indirectly, as an outcome from the meas- 

 ure of material resource that the soil has yielded, have also 

 sprung schools, education, literatures, arts, sciences. We 

 need a nature study that shall be the old nurse to the child, 

 as to the race, and guide his work and play toward becom- 

 ing civilized, and toward making the most and best of all 

 good qualities he possesses. What does counting the legs 

 of a cow or the toenails of a chicken have to do with this? 

 I fail to see the connection of such things as these with any- 

 thing more fundamental than the science of comparative 

 anatomy. It is a great science, but it is scarcely more than 

 a generation old, and mankind got along well for thousands 

 of years before comparative anatomy was born. 



