1898.] ESSAYS. 75 



flourishing and its own members active and interested for more 

 than fifty years. I refer to the matter of offering prizes for the 

 best specimens grown. This has introduced helpful competi- 

 tion, thus making the progress of the Society an interesting game, 

 already more than tifty years long. Bringing in a little fun, a 

 spice of rivalry, used to make spelling, and dull old-fashioned 

 parsing, interesting. To stand at the head or foot of the class 

 sufficed to make the old spelling class the most interesting and 

 enjoyable exercise of the whole day, simply because we made a 

 game of it, and this is one the elements of the natural education 

 which I hope is coming. By all manner of moralizing or 

 preaching we might fail to get a child to put his whole soul into 

 the raising of a plant ; and very possibly we could not succeed 

 in hiring him to do it. But make a game of it, and the children 

 take to it like ducks to water. The experiment was tried in one 

 of our schools last year, and, although from lack of experience 

 the plan followed was not as good as it might have been, I was 

 agreeably surprised at the results. The experiment consisted in 

 giving to each child who wished to try, in all the rooms in the 

 building, a certain number of flower seeds from the same 

 packet, offering small prizes for the best plants brought in 

 at the end of the spring term. I have found it somewhat 

 difficult to get the public to grasp the purpose of this work. 

 The idea is not so much to raise a beautiful plant. We 

 can hardly expect this, especially at first, from children who 

 have never planted a seed in their lives. All we can expect is 

 that each child shall rear the best plant that he can. It is a mat- 

 ter of no great consequence whether the plant be June grass or 

 some rare flower. The putting of his whole soul into making it 

 grow as well as he can, better than someone else, in order to 

 give it the character of a game, this is the real purpose of the 

 work. 



Think for a moment what a large lesson we have given our 

 child. In order to master it properly, how much he must learn 

 about soils, plant food in the soil, the influence of warmth, 

 moisture and sunlight, the prevention of plant diseases and the 

 destruction of injurious insects. It is in fact the lesson of the 



