DOWNING] AIMS OF NATURE-STUDY 165 



power from muscle to steam made possible and necessary the 

 revolution in education though the effect was long delayed by 

 expensive war and social inertia. A single engine frees a hundred 

 laborers and multiplies by just so much the productive power of 

 one operator. 



This industrial emancipation has made education possible for 

 the masses who come demanding that with the least possible 

 expenditure of time, money and energy there shall be provided a 

 course as effective from the educational standpoint as the classical 

 but made up of those studies that have a distinct wage-earning 

 value. Nature-study comes to us as a part of this popular, prac- 

 tical, scientific movement. The commonplace objects are its 

 appropriate subject-matter. It affiliates with gardening, agri- 

 culture and other commercially valuable subjects. Yet its pur- 

 pose is not primarily commercial. Its aim is not to teach the 

 farmer lad how to win a few more bushels of grain from a relcu- 

 tant soil nor the would-be carpenter how to select his timber 

 more profitably. While the demand for nature-study has come 

 from the practical masses its aim is to put into the commonplace 

 objects a spiritual significance, to fill them with the suggestions 

 of the vast import that the world's master minds have seen in 

 them, to insure their recall of the vision of the seer, the inspired 

 interpretation of the artist and poet. 



"How wearily the grind of toil goes on 

 Where love is wanting, how the eye and ear 

 And heart are starved amidst the plenitude • 

 Of Nature. 

 * * * * 



And, in sad keeping with the things about them, 

 Shrill querulous women, sour and sullen men, 

 Untidy, loveless, old before their time, 

 With scarce a human interest save their own 

 Monotonous round of small economies, 

 Or the poor scandal of the neighborhood; 

 Blind to the beauty everywhere revealed. 

 Treading the Mayflower with regardless feet ; 

 For them the song sparrow and the bobolink 

 Sang not, nor winds made music in the leaves; 

 For them in vain October's holocaust 

 Burned gold and crimson, over all the hills, 

 The sacramental mystery of the woods." 



Nature-Study embodies a protest against the mere intellectual 



