236 THE NA TURE-STUDY REVIEW [ 5:(J _ DEC ., I909 



chanced to go by the tree in the orchard where they had lived, 

 and I put my hand into the nest. To my surprise, I found the 

 bottom filled with sand. I dug it all out and found there was 

 between two and three inches of it. This was queer, for the 

 books say that the flickers make a bed of chips for their young to 

 rest upon. There wasn't a chip inside; they were all on the 

 ground. I think that my flickers must have "known" that 

 sand was more absorbent than chips could possibly be, and had 

 brought it to their nest to keep it clean and wholesome. It was 

 a fine gravel such as one finds in a gravel pit, and it must have 

 been brought from a distance, as there is no sand in the vicinity. 



"SO-CALLED NATURE-STCJDY" 



By M. A. BIGELOW 



In various educational journals and books authors have 

 mentioned nature-study as "so-called nature-study", as an 

 "unfortunate term", and in other apologetic ways. In fact the 

 habit of using the term nature-study with an apology has been 

 very common, especially among college men who have been 

 more or less displeased by some of the school work which has 

 been classified as nature-study. 



Perhaps etymologically considered nature-study is an "un- 

 fortunate term", but so are dozens of other words which by 

 usage have become perfectly satisfactory as to definiteness of 

 meaning. Certainly a biologist who objects to the word nature- 

 study ought not to forget that, as Huxley once pointed out, even 

 the name of the science — biology — deserves to be in quotation 

 marks or designated "so-called," for literally biology is a dis- 

 course on human life and to the Greeks could not possibly have 

 meant all animal and plant life. However, all scientific people 

 now know what is meant by biology and only the hypercritical 

 student of languages wastes energy in criticising the word because 

 of its etymological inheritance. As another example, the biologi- 

 cal word cell might be designated, in strict usage, as "so-called" 

 and "unfortunate" and put in quotation marks. But authorita- 

 tive usage has made its special meaning so definite that certainly 

 no one outside of institutions for the weak minded would urge 

 that cell in biological books should continue to be printed with 

 apologies for the term having had its origin in connecting with 

 a misinterpretation of the early histological observations. 



