No. 4.] LOVE AND STUDY OF NATURE. 147 



made so fascinating as introductions to the study of animate 

 nature, suggest to us where these interests strike their roots 

 deepest and where alone pedagogic art can find or generate 

 the zest that can generate momentum enough to conquer the 

 technique of histological methods and technical nomen- 

 clature. Save in the feeble and often infantile beginnings 

 here and there made in the kindergarten grades, the true 

 methods in this field are at present, we must candidly admit, 

 as yet undeveloped. This is a field ripe for the harvest of 

 pedagogical research and investigation ; and I know of few 

 lines so ripe for epoch making, greatly needed and inevitable 

 reconstruction of present methods, where a committee often, 

 if indeed the country can supply that number of the compe- 

 tent, should seek a consensus of the best that recent scientific 

 developments of pedagogic art and psychogenetical results 

 could now supply. 



Again, geology is one of the greatest triumphs of the 

 human mind. It giv r es in outline, although with many gaps, 

 the development-history of the world in which we live ; and 

 its educational value, not only from the importance of its 

 body of facts, but as logical discipline, is perhaps second to no 

 science. But mineralogy, with its technical nomenclature and 

 detailed study of the forms of crystals, and especially petrog- 

 raphy, while perhaps the best method of logical approach, is 

 the worst pedagogically. Rather the selected topics from 

 the life of primitive and perhaps cave-dwelling man ; the 

 extinct animals and plants ; the landscape in the period of 

 coral formation ; emergence and subsidence ; reversing the 

 order of time and always beginning with subjects of human 

 interest and irradiating to the vegetable and then the inani- 

 mate world, and back towards primeval nebula?, with paleon- 

 tology always preceding lithology, — would be the order of 

 psychic evolution. 



I have no time or space here for details concerning these 

 or other departments of nature study. My purpose is solely 

 to show the difference between the genetic or pedagogic and 

 the logical method. The latter is essentially for the adult 

 mind, and a great error of teachers and curricula has been 

 that these scholastic ways of approach have been substituted 

 for those which conform to the natural laws of* growth of the 



