1 3 2 THE NA TURK- STUD Y RE VIE W [3 : 5- m ay, ,907 



let him think how much of this field his physician ought to 

 know and then trace its value in relation to food and textile 

 industries. It would be well for the world if the rising genera- 

 tion could come to know in a practical and intimate manner 

 just how this knowledge was obtained by man. It did not 

 come through any artificial system of education but by a method 

 very foreign to all such systems, and that was through the 

 direct study of nature herself. 



The method by which man has lifted himself so far above the 

 rest of the brute kingdom and through which he has received 

 such practical and valuable returns is a method that we should 

 train our children to use, and it is most assuredly the true method 

 for nature-study. It has as yet but a very small place in our 

 schools; and one of the strongest reasons we have for the 

 introduction of nature-study is to supply that training which 

 only this direct method can give. Its contributions to civili- 

 zation should convince the most skeptical as to its great worth. 



The need of this contact or laboratory method has been the 

 more markedly felt on account of the influence of city life and the 

 increased term of the child's imprisonment between uninviting 

 school walls. Many have noted with grave apprehension that these 

 influences have both served to markedly lessen if not in greater 

 part to do away with the nature-schooling which in former 

 generations played so prominent a part in early child life. If 

 the law of biogenesis demands a recapitulation of race history 

 as a foundation for all higher development, should we not view 

 with some concern so marked a suppression of free contact with 

 nature in the child life of today? This great biological law not 

 only gives us important reasons for the introduction of nature- 

 study into the too cold atmosphere of ordinary school life, but 

 serves as a guide in the order of presentation of our material. 

 The children of the lower grades should be led to picture to 

 themselves the life of the hunter and the reasons why he must 

 often go hungry. The story of the famine in Longfellow's 

 "Hiawatha" illustrates this phase. How superior to this is the pic- 

 ture of nomadic life. Next comes the tillage of the soil with the 

 more permanent and better home, and last the story of the im- 

 provement and preservation of our foods and the work of the agri- 

 cultural experiment stations. 



There is another organic law which should be one of great 



