1 8 2 THE NA TU RE-STUD Y RE VIE W [3 : 6-sept., .907 



ciples and provides little opportunity for their application. It is much better 

 for one with a large apperceptive mass— that is, for the farmer rather than 

 for the farmer's child, and for one who wishes to organize on a scientific 

 basis knowledge he already has and who wishes to provide scientific hooks 

 upon which to hang new knowledge where it will be handy. The fault, 

 I should say, is not so much with the book, which is admirable in many 

 ways, as in the uses to which it has been put. It has been made a substitute 

 for nature-study against the advice of its editor. It has been literally thrown 

 at children who did not **know how to observe." It has been used in a 

 wild attempt to improve at once the farmer's child and the farm, but not the 

 farmer for whom it was primarily written. These errors are largely 

 excusable on the ground that for a long time no other material was available, 

 and it had to function as a **dual purpose" book, to borrow a stockman's 

 phrase. 



The following characteristics are mentioned for sake of comparison with 

 those of the two newer books noticed later. The book is well balanced and 

 shows little unevenness of treatment. The entire contribution of chemistry 

 to the topic of soil is more difficult than the rest of the book, but shows little 

 internal inconsistency. In class work the book lends itself too easily to a 

 dead memory method. Where agriculture has been made mandatory, that is 

 the way the book has been often taught, even down in the eighth grade, and 

 with little use of the illustrative material furnished in the chapter notes. 

 This, by the way, is partly of the nature-study type that is considered to be 

 the prerequisite. 



Some of the purely elementary texts go to the opposite extreme. Their 

 tables of contents are scarcely more than lists of crops and breeds. Such a 

 «' Ready Reference for Little Farmers," stuffed with facts but completely 

 devoid of thought content, is as well calculated to starve the mental life of 

 the child as the shorter catechism. 



Jackson and Daugherty's ** Agriculture through Laboratory and School- 

 Garden" is fundamentally different from Bailey's '* Principles" in many 

 respects. (i) It provides for much doing; it calls for much practice of the 

 principles enunciated and for use of the knowledge given, tnd also for con- 

 siderable inductive work. On the other hand, ihe spirit of the text of 

 ** Principles of Agriculture," by Bailey, is purely deductive. (2) much 

 more of the spirit of the high-school sciences as such is evident. The first 

 two chapters are a condensed physical geography, dealing with solar energy, 

 the ocean, and with all the weathering agenrs, even to the glaciers. This 

 forms the setting for the next two chapters dealing with soil and its relation to 

 the plant. Similarly Chapters IX, X, and XI make up a concentrated com- 



