No. 4.] NATURE STUDY. 225 



And now I want to state facts with reference to some of 

 our schools here in Massachusetts, which may be a little 

 more encouraging than some that the professor has so fairly 

 presented. In one of these schools which I visited, the 

 children have been gathering the various kinds of wood and 

 giving a description of where they grew, and certainly 

 many of them have found more kinds of wood on the hills 

 of Hampshire and Berkshire than I supposed grew in New 

 England. I visited a school where the children had brought 

 the earliest flowers, telling where they grew, the soil in 

 which they grew, etc. I was in a school to-day in this 

 State in which the teacher had procured two specimens 

 from the lobster family. You would have been interested 

 in seeing how those children gathered around a little 



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water tank, to see how these animals disported themselves 



and moved through the water. He told me that during 



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the summer time he had had more than a dozen snakes of 

 different kinds brought in by the children, and that they 

 would pick them up and bring them in. And so the vari- 

 ous forms of animal life and vegetable life are introduced 

 in the schools, and the children are encouraged to watch 

 the growth. I have seen in our country homes children 

 that have tamed a fox, or a wild goose or duck ; and I 

 have watched with great interest to see what new interest 

 there had come to be in the various forms of animal life. 

 I think the children are going to come into closer touch 

 in this way with our domestic animals, with a better knowl- 

 edge, kindlier spirit, and disposition to treat them as they 

 should be treated. I am very glad these strictures have 

 come with regard to book study. The children should get 

 their knowledge of nature through the teacher and from 

 nature itself; and when our children can read the books of 

 Mr. Burroughs we shall find that nature study will be 

 much more interesting and very much more profitable to 

 the children. Many of the teachers and many of the chil- 

 dren do find, as proved to me in the State work, the study 

 to be tiresome and laborious ; but where the living things 

 are introduced into the schoolroom, and the children brought 

 into direct touch with them, they come to realize so much 



