60 NATURE STUDY REVIEW [8 :2— Feb.. 1912 



the marketing of the garden produce opens up a number of ques- 

 tions in practical political economy, such as, the relation of sup- 

 ply and demand, manipulation of prices, co-operative marketing, 

 and earning capacity of lands. The consideration of some of 

 these topics will also involve a knowledge of geography includ- 

 ing the subject of transportation; the preparation of garden vege- 

 tables for food will lead naturally to a reference to domestic 

 science. 



Finally the use of the school garden as a center for the teach- 

 ing of nature study guarantees that a number of exceedingly in- 

 teresting and profitable lessons are to be learned incidentally in 

 their nature study work. One of the most useful of these les- 

 sons is the respect which pupils who take gardening come to have 

 for the man who works with his hands, the lesson of the dignity of 

 manual labor. Young people are driven from the farm not only 

 by their lack of interest in farm work, but also by false pride 

 with regard to manual labor. Hence many of them go to the 

 city to seek a means of earning a living in some, to them, more 

 ennobling way. In the garden pupils also come to have a sense 

 of ownership and to see clearly the difference between mine and 

 thine, a fact not always very clear to a somewhat large percentage 

 of young Americans. They also come by a sense of proprietor- 

 ship which gives them a proper feeling of independence and 

 strength and self-respect which cannot easily be gained in any 

 other way. J. J. Hill, the railway magnate, points out the fact, 

 that, next to self-preservation, the strongest instinct of the human 

 race is the desire to own something, that is, to be a proprietor, 

 and that one of the best preliminaries for young people pre- 

 paratory to launching out into life is early to acquire the strength 

 and independence that comes from and is attendant upon owner- 

 ship of something, however little that something may be. Close- 

 ly connected with the foregoing is the fact that pupils through 

 finding the cost of crops in labor will come to have an appreciation 

 of the real value of money, an exceedingly profitable thing for 

 the boy and the girl to learn early in life, as a needful preface to 

 the formation of habits of thrift. The opportunity which the 

 school garden gives for teaching the pupils what constitutes an 

 honest hour's work and for teaching cooperation and neighbor- 

 liness has been pointed out above. 



Nature study put into actual practice in the school garden 

 gives excellent opportunity for the inculcation of habits of neat- 

 ness and orderliness, and demonstrates strikingly to the pupils 

 themselves the value of these habits. In a similar way, through 

 neglect of cultivation and irrigation, the pupil learns the bad cft'ect 

 of allowing work to accumulate. The garden left to itself 



