I 66 THE NA TURE-STUD Y RE VIE W [ S : 7 — oct. 1909 



whole school; and I may almost say that the whole school took 

 part in that exercise. Grammar, geography, arithmetic, play, 

 mischief, drowsiness, all gave way to intense interest ; even the 

 little six- or seven-year-old watched and listened with glistening 

 eyes and attentive ears. My devices were all duplicated, and my 

 experiments were repeated morning, noon and night a hundred 

 times. A mill in the vicinity was invaded night and morning by 

 an eager crowd of boys, and no mechanical arrangement from 

 the big water-wheel down below to the dusty pulleys and cog- 

 wheels in the attic escaped them. A company of them took a 

 twenty-mile ride on a bitter winter day, in order to examine the 

 mechanism for reversing the motion of the locomotive engine. 

 The country was ransacked by these embryo scientists, and old 

 and forgotten apparatus was brought to light and made to 

 contribute to our stock. And yet this was in a common school, 

 and the pupils were such as you may find in thousands of places in 

 Iowa. 



"But this was not all ; their enthusiasm was not expended upon 

 natural philosophy alone. One morning a boy brought a little 

 stone containing a fossil, and laying it on my table, asked what it 

 was. I told him; and after an hour or so, made it the text for a 

 short geological lecture to the school. Soon the stones began to 

 come in, and some mornings my table was literally covered with 

 the contributions from my amateur paleontologists. In this 

 again the whole school seemed to be interested. I shall not soon 

 forget one little fellow, the only one whose eye I could never 

 catch while talking about the specimens before me, and whom I 

 supposed to be utterly indifferent to all this scientific furore. 

 One evening I was walking alone to my boarding place, an hour or 

 so after the close of school, and as I rose above the crest of a hill, 

 I saw in the distance some one, with a great stone held in his two 

 hands, hammering vigorously a large rock by the roadside. I 

 soon found that it was my pupil, and so intent was he that he did 

 not dicover that he was observed until I approached quite near 

 to him, when dropping his stone and seizing his basket, he 

 marched on with an air of the utmost indifference for me, or for 

 rocks, or for fossils. And yet a day or two later that little fellow 

 brought me a magnificent specimen of a fossil coral." 



This took place in a country school in southern Michigan in 

 1867-8, more than forty years ago, and I reproduce it here to 



