146 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Pub. Doc. 



expert is himself a child, better than they can at the very 

 beginning grapple with the subtle laws of valencies, or be 

 forced to speak and write at once in the new and wonder- 

 ful language of chemical symbols. 



Perhaps the worst pedagogic sin against the laws of 

 psychogenesis is now perpetrated in the way in which botany 

 and zoology is begun. Here often we still have first of all 

 classification and Latin names, which came so late in the de- 

 velopment of science, and yet now, since evolution has been 

 so revolutionary, serve only to set biological housekeeping 

 in order and get ready for work. It is so fascinating to 

 the adult mind to begin logically with the cell or with 

 lowest forms of life, the latter sometimes inaccessible, 

 the former never seen save through a microscope, and to 

 proceed up the scale of development by complexity in a way 

 which brings last those things which are most familiar, in- 

 stead of starting, as old naturalists did, with the simple, 

 breezy, out-of-door and undeflowered love of nature. A 

 comprehensive consensus shows that children on the average 

 know and love best in order, among the flowers, first the 

 rose, then the violet, daisy, buttercup, lily; of garden 

 growths, first the potato, then corn, tomato, bean, radish ; 

 of insects, first the bee, then the butterfly, ant, fly, mosquito, 

 spider, wasp, grasshopper, beetle ; of birds, the robin, then 

 the sparrow, canary, bluebird, blackbird, parrot, hawk, 

 swallow, crow, eagle, pigeon ; of domestic animals, the order 

 is the dog, cat, horse, hog, sheep, mouse ; of wild animals, 

 the elephant, lion, tiger, bear, monkey, wolf, and so on. This 

 shows us where interest begins, is deepest and strongest ; 

 and when we turn to the folklore of plants and animals, we 

 find something very like the same order in the profusion of 

 myths, songs, poetic names, etc. Flowers are a kind of 

 language of the heart, and are loved themselves and express 

 human affection. I collected once twenty-one poems on the 

 daisy, and no doubt as many poems, fables perhaps with a 

 moral, proverbs, etc., could be collected of many other ob- 

 jects in the above list. The mythic trees, from those in 

 Eden to the sacred oak of Dedona, and the fairy and trans- 

 migration tales, and especially the studies of fertilization 

 and of the life-history and instinct of animals, which can be 



