156 NATURE STUDY REVIEW [8 :4— April, 1912 



simple ones on the water holding capacity of soils, and the 

 lifting power of soils for water. 



From the study of water and other soil constituents as types 

 of energy, the class may be led to name other forms of energy, 

 such as heat, light, electricity, etc. Then a more detailed study 

 of any one of these topics may follow. 



Editorial 



The pessimist on American education need only attend a 

 meeting of the Superintendents of the National Education Asso- 

 ciation to be transformed into an optimist. It was a fine crowd 

 of men that filled to overflowing the audience rooms and the hotel 

 lobbies at the St. Louis meeting ^February 20th to 29th. Eighteen 

 hundred and more were there, representing the entire country. 

 Far from being the traditional stoop-shouldered, anaemic peda- 

 gogues, they were on the contrary stalwart fellows with good red 

 blood, alert, jovial, and aggressive. 



It is evident that these men consider the instruction in agri- 

 culture a current topic of importance. The Round Table of State 

 and County Superintendents devoted Wednesday afternoon to a 

 discussion of agriculture in the rural schools, with such men as 

 Earl Barnes, U. S. Commissioner Claxton, E. C. Bishop, and 

 others, as speakers. Commissioner Claxton, in his evening ad- 

 dress Wednesday night eloquently maintained that the subject 

 matter properly connected with the farm is ample to tax the ca- 

 pacity, and develop both the mind and body of the child. He de- 

 clared the rural school problem to be America's great unsolved 

 educational problem. The responses to the toasts at the banquet 

 in his honor on Monday night had much the same import. Wed- 

 nesday afternoon the department of Normal Schools heard E. E. 

 Balcomb discuss "The Place of the State Normal School in Agri- 

 cultural Education." All Tuesday morning the National Com- 

 mittee of Agricultural Education were busy on agricultural 

 topics, and the National Society for the Study of Education de- 

 voted half its report, — reviewed elsewhere in this issue, — to 

 agricultural education in secondary schools. 



This prominence of agricultural instruction at the winter 

 meeting is only one of the many indications of the feverish in- 

 terest in this subject. Seventy-five text books on agriculture for 

 the common schools have already been published, twenty per cent 

 of these within three years. Forty states require agriculture as 



