bessey] some BEGINNINGS IN NATURE-STUDY i 6j 



show what was being done at that time, and it was this aspect of 

 nature-study that I presented to the teachers of Nebraska schools 

 nearly twenty-five years ago. 



In the earlier years of the movement for nature-study in 

 Nebraska, a vicious tendency to make it quite symbolic gained 

 some headway and required much vigorous combating to over- 

 come before it subsided. Many teachers who knew practically 

 nothing about any department of nature attempted to lead the 

 children in the study of plants, the result being a frightful hodge- 

 podge of misinformation as to the plants, and ridiculous attempts 

 to liken flowers and fruits and leaves to people, or to connect 

 them with crudely conceived fairy tales. And I have had 

 middle-aged teachers stoutly maintain that this was nature- 

 study; and they were much aggrieved when I pronounced it not 

 only of no value whatever, but positively harmful. 



But the fairy-tale type of nature has now practically dis- 

 appeared from Nebraska, and flowers are now examined for their 

 own sake. The fruits are cut open and looked at and tasted as 

 fruits, and not as something else. So, too, the leaves are leaves, 

 and not "hands" or "faces," or anything else that they are not. 

 I am not prepared to say that some belated teacher in some part 

 of the State may not be likening plants to people or fairies. But 

 there is very little of such stuff now taught "in the open." Our 

 best teachers, and there are a great many of them, know better 

 and study nature in a natural way. With them a plant is a 

 plant, a flower is a flower, and these are studied as plants and 

 flowers. And the good effect is seen in the students who come up 

 from the schools and enter my classes in botany. They know 

 something valuable about plants. They know whac the inside 

 of a particular fruit looks like, they know the structure of many a 

 flower, or even of some of the lower plants. They know some- 

 thing of nature, because they have studied nature. 



