252 THE NATURE-STUDY REVIEW [1, 6, nov. 1905 



least, there are likely to be bright boys or girls who would esteem 

 it a privilege to gather material for use in school, and they should 

 occasionally be given opportunities to do so. The interest of 

 the field lessons will be greatly increased when the children can 

 be taken to some woodsy by-road where they can gather twigs 

 of certain trees and shrubs for their future study, and the later 

 study in the schoolroom will take on an added interest from the 

 memories of the trip. The wise teacher will be likely to utilize 

 as many as possible of these various advantages and will not 

 tie herself down to any one method of procedure. 



It is very desirable that each pupil be furnished for his own 

 special use a twig of the tree being studied. Where the classes 

 are small, having only twenty or twenty-five pupils in each, it 

 is a comparatively simple matter to carry out this idea ; but even 

 where classes are double this size it is not very difficult to carry 

 it out. In any schoolroom where serious nature-study is done — 

 and to my mind no nature-study is serious which does not bring 

 the pupil into intimate contact with the real thing — some place 

 must be provided for the material to be studied. A table or wide 

 shelf or even a window-sill, on the side of the room where the 

 sun does not shine brightly through the window, should be set 

 apart for the nature-study specimens, which will vary with the 

 ever-changing seasons. The twigs may be kept to advantage in 

 vases or jars containing water which will keep them in a natural 

 condition for several weeks. Perhaps nothing is better for the 

 ordinary schoolroom, which has no special facilities, than a dozen 

 or more common glass tumblers of good thickness and as plain 

 as it is possible to get them. These are inexpensive and serve 

 very well as receptacles not only for the twigs but for flowers 

 and leafy branches at other seasons of the year. 



Tasting. — Those who have been much with hunters or other 

 woodsmen of long experience must have noticed how often 

 various trees and shrubs were determined by means of the sense 

 of taste. In the case of many species the taste of the bark is one 

 of the most certain characteristics and sometimes furnishes the 

 easiest way to distinguish a given tree from others which re- 

 semble it. For example, the sweet birch or black birch may at 

 once be known among the birches by the sweetly aromatic taste 

 of the bark, and the wild cherries may be easily distinguished 

 from the birches, the twigs of which they resemble, by the in- 



