SINGER] NATURE-STUDY AND PHYSICAL SCIENCE 1 77 



It is needless to say there were ten interested pupils in that 

 class, and when they were allowed to take the apparatus they 

 had made home and asked to locate the north from their own yard 

 their cup of joy was more than filled. Science, yes, but nature- 

 study emphatically of the true kind. Better that one lesson than 

 a dozen of the pouring-in kind. The effect of catching the 

 interest of that class lasted during the term and insured the 

 teacher's success with a class which before that had proven rather 

 refractory. One boy discovered that his needle would pick up 

 bits of iron and steel, another that he could magnetize a second 

 needle from his own needle. A third boy saw a surveyor la3ang 

 down the line for a granolithic pavement about his home and 

 recognized the needle in the transit. A fourth saw a lumberman 

 who wore a small compass suspended to his watch fob. A fifth 

 was interested in the gun-metal case worn by an electrician to 

 protect his watch from the magnetism of the .dynamos. So the 

 wide-awake young Americans came in touch with much valuable 

 information about things magnetic and electrical as well as the 

 geographical lesson which was primarily intended. 



Take a Florence flask with rubber cork through which passes a 

 glass tube half-way to the bottom. Heat a teaspoonful of 

 ammonia water in the flask and connect the glass tube with a pail 

 of water by means of rubber tubing, when as if by magic in the 

 eyes of the children, the water runs from the pail up into the 

 bottle as high as they can hold it and plays in a fountain until 

 the bottle is nearly filled. The idea of a vacuum and the principle 

 of "suction" will suggest to the active minds the pump-siphon, 

 sipping of soda-water through a straw, and many of the interest- 

 ing facts of pneumatics and hydrostatics. 



Chemistry abounds with experiments many of which are 

 entirely free from danger and intensely interesting to children. 

 For example : A solution of sugar made by the children, a thread 

 suspended in it and the watching of the growth of the crystals of 

 rock candy; the same experiment performed with alum or blue- 

 stone. A doll dressed with clothes dipped in cobalt solution, 

 serves as a hygrometer — pink before a storm, blue in dry weather 

 — and will make the children observant of other weather signs 

 more related to their every-day life. 



The chemical tablets which will enable the child to grow plants 

 in the most unique positions — suspended by a cord in mid-air, in 



