No. 4.] LOVE AND STUDY OF NATURE. 143 



tional possibilities which heredity has stored up, which, 

 when explored and utilized to its full extent, will reveal, in 

 rny judgment, pedagogic possibilities now undreamed of. 

 The whole history of the domestication of the two or three 

 hundred animal species has largely been the product of this 

 sympathy with the brute mind and life ; and if it be true, as 

 is claimed, that most of all these animals have been trained 

 by woman, it is only another illustration of the fact that her 

 life and mind are more generic than that of man. Even the 

 instinctive fear of animals, insects, etc., often harmless, 

 shows not only how old and close the relation between man 

 and beast has been in the past, despite the great evolution- 

 ary chasm caused by the loss of the whole series of missing 

 links, but supplies the other chief ingredient of interest, 

 which is most intense where fear and the love which casts it 

 out are battling for supremacy. This stratum is one of the 

 very richest layers in paleopsychic development, and its out- 

 crops in the many varied zoolotries of savage life which show 

 its strength constitute one of the most interesting illustra- 

 tions of the way in which the stages of a child's develop- 

 ment repeat those through which the race has passed. 



Inadequate as are the partial presentations of this mo- 

 mentous theme, they at least give us the stand-point from 

 which we can pass at once to the chief practical application 

 which I wish to make of the modern doctrine of nature. It 

 is that nature in this broad conception of the term includes 

 the fundamental subject-matter of all education, and that 

 language study is accessory and essentially only expressive 

 of it ; that mathematics is simply the most accurate descrip- 

 tion of facts and laws in nature ; and that every technical or 

 methodic department of education is entirely subordinate 

 and accessory as a means to the one great end of knowing 

 the world in which we live. Consider for a moment to what 

 an extent the school has both perverted and inverted the 

 order of growth. Astronomy, perhaps the oldest science, 

 was first of all a religion, and its early development was the 

 product of pure intellectual curiosity. The study of celes- 

 tial objects and phenomena were all associated with man's 

 conception of the future home of the soul. Later, the prac- 

 tical side, useful in navigation and in establishing topo- 



