No. 4.] LOVE AND STUDY OF NATURE. 151 



ing. Indeed, I think the students of childhood will before 

 long be ready with a recipe for making these text-books and 

 courses that will obviate many of these evils ; but I have 

 space here only to characterize what is now, since theology 

 has withdrawn most of her objections to science teaching, 

 its next most formidable and hereditary foe. 



To conclude, nature has a practical aspect ; but even agri- 

 culturists should not limit their interest in her phenomena 

 to the economic side. The harm or good done to crops by 

 insects, birds and animals has been a very great stimulus to 

 the study of their instincts and breeding habits ; and the 

 utilitarian knowledge thus acquired is of very high impor- 

 tance, but it is not all. There is another higher and purely 

 scientific interest, prompted by man's undying passion to 

 know. This intellectual interest has given us the best, 

 fullest and most accurate knowledge we have of embryology, 

 classification and every other factor which makes the great 

 body of natural science, which is one of the most precious 

 achievements of the race thus far. This impulse has given 

 us evolution, which, whether as an increase of mental econ- 

 omy by affording a wider range of knowledge with less 

 effort, or as re basing all our fundamental conceptions of 

 life, love, reproduction and disease, is, with the doctrine of 

 the conservation of energy, the great scientific achievement 

 of this century, which makes it now impossible for a specialist 

 to be narrow. 



But there is a third factor. Myth has always been the 

 matrix of science. Indeed, it has been more, — it has been 

 the very yolk itself to be transformed. Myth is the juvenile 

 form of science ; in clumsy trope children have a special set of 

 intellectual milk teeth, very variable in size and some of them 

 never lost, especially adapted for the animistic stage of men- 

 tal nutrition and development. In the largest sense of the 

 words, myth and science, neither can entirely expel the 

 other. The mechanical accurate view of things may pre- 

 dominate at one time or in some minds, and the poetic or 

 spiritual at other times or in other minds ; but one criterion 

 of each is, how much of the other it can carry and vitalize. 

 The human stand-point for the study of nature is not only 

 the best introduction to the religious view of the world, but 



