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child, and the adult, too, should have an informal, heartfelt, sympathetic rela- 

 tion to a variety of isolated, individual, natural objects. This most of us call 

 * 'nature-study," an unfortunate term, for it really isn't study, but rather 

 friendly acquaintance. John Burroughs nicely described it: **I should not 

 try directly to teach young people to love nature so much as 1 should aim to 

 bring nature and them together, and let an understanding and intimacy spring 

 up between them." Later, with the desire for further, definite, formal, 

 intellectual, synthetic relations to classified natural objects, comes what most 

 of us call * 'science." 



I maintain that Dr. Hornaday is right if he is referring to science, and 

 wrong if he is speaking from the nature-study point of view, as I have defined 

 it. He ridicules a book that might contain a "mixing up (of) all living 

 things — birds, bugs, flowers, mushrooms, shells, crabs and trees — in a chao- 

 tic mass." Yet he is the director of such a book of living material. I know 

 of no other place where such variety may be found. Looked at by a "na- 

 ture-study child, what a medley. Viewed by a "science" adult, what per- 

 fect system and classification. The other day I took a party (interested in 

 both nature-study and science) to see his open book. Here is the chaotic 

 mass that nature- study found, in the order in which we observed them as we 

 walked along the paths: deer, osprey nest, pelican, crow, elephant, peacock, 

 camel, snowy heron, tiger, lion, fox, wolf, skunk, turtle, snake, sea-lion, 

 raccoon, turkey, grizzly bear, monkey, more sea-lions, rhinoceros, hornbill, 

 cockatoo. What "a chaotic mass." Yet every visitor to the New York 

 Zoological Park knows that innumerable lists might be made, in just such 

 disorderly arrangement, of the things that most appeal to a child when he 

 begins his work of informal nature-study. A scientist goes along the same 

 paths in Professor Hornaday' s collection and sees most admirable classifica- 

 tion. Likewise the whole world seems a delightful confusion of interests and 

 surprises to the "nature-study" child, but how perfect the plan, how com- 

 plete the system to a scientist! How interesting to the child to see what the 

 individual plant or animal is doing; how important to the scientist to know, 

 and know well, where that individual belongs. And the whole of the so- 

 called "confusion" or "chaotic mass," is a failure to recognize the fact that 

 we shouldn't always remain nature-study children, and that we cannot be 

 scientists at the start, not even "elementary" scientists. We need first the 

 nature-study spirit; but after this first love has been aroused, do not drop the 

 subject, but gradually lead the student to a knowledge of its strictly scientific 

 aspects. We must learn the alphabet before we can begin to read. 



The ideal nature-study book should describe things as we see them at Pro- 

 fessor Hornaday's park and everywhere else in the vt'orld — a little of every- 



