No. 4.] NATURE STUDY. 223 



remember the instruction of only fifteen minutes, and take 

 the plants and deal with them ; and -I made a little further 

 obligation, — that what they had learned they should bring 

 to school in the form of a letter, tellini>; their fellows what 

 they had learned, each one. Now, what was the result? 

 Quite a number said tome, " You will not hear from one 

 of these children. If there is anything a child dislikes to 

 do, it is to write a composition. You have defeated your 

 whole work by placing the obligation on them to bring to 

 school the few points they have learned." The following 

 spring I was overwhelmed, near the middle of April, — my 

 mail came in completely loaded down with applications for 

 strawberry plants. Not only from the schools in Westches- 

 ter County, but the New York papers had published this 

 offer, and you know how children read papers. The chil- 

 dren of New York City supposed they were included in the 

 offer, and I had two thousand applications from New York 

 City children for strawberry plants. Every child got his 

 plants. In other parts of the State papers had copied the 

 offer, and the children all over the State supposed they 

 were included, and I got applications from almost every 

 county in the State of New York. The result was, when I 

 had finished the work I had sent out over twenty thousand 

 strawberry plants. Exactly upon the line we have had 

 here to-night, those children went out and did something. 

 That is the kind of teaching that is going to be of value, — 

 to give the children something to do. 



Concerning these compositions that came back, here is one 

 illustration. A boy in New York City wrote in the month 

 of August, saying: "The plants you sent me have mul- 

 tiplied. I have so many new plants that I feel confident I 

 can do something if I can rent a little piece of land outside 

 the city, and raise fruit and send to market and help my 

 mother pay the house rent." The boy did rent the laud. 

 He set out two thousand plants, and made a success of it, 

 and helped his mother pay the rent. There was one of the 

 fruits, and I might mention many others. Those text books 

 are entirely inadequate to the needs of the schools, and Ave 

 have been interested in the presentation of the question 



