296 NATURE STUDY REVIEW [8 :8— Nov., 1912 



do not care whether the ichneunion fly is a hymenoptera or just 

 a plain insect with wings, but in the collection of two hundred 

 tussock moth caterpillar cocoons in one walk around their ad- 

 ministration building last fall they "felt" God's protecting care 

 for us through his placing this little parasitic fly in the larvae of 

 our shade trees' ravagers. They do not know the difference 

 between a sepal and a petal, but a boy of one of the upper 

 grade schools took clandestinely a trillium from the waste basket 

 under the teacher's desk and pressed it in his book because, 

 as he told her, "he could always study better with a flower on 

 his desk !" A division of bright little chaps tussled and sweated 

 hour after hour to dig worms to toss to a limb where a mother 

 robin took them to feed her babies. If you should tell them a 

 "Troglodytes aedon" was in the Rose of Sharon bush outside 

 their kindergarten window they would stand speechless and 

 dumb, but if their wren should "say his beads" as he never 

 forgets to do, from his bird house which occupies its place close to 

 each school, the windows would be stampeded without ceremony. 



A "shrike" that built its nest on the north side of the grounds, 

 preened itself, within four feet of its nest, while kindergarten 

 children fed "bugs" to the handsomest babies of the bird world. 



The blue jay was made to bury his acorns and "sass" his 

 neighbors from the limbs of trees. One was found once on the 

 grounds hanging head down entangled in his own nest building. 

 One Boys' room took a morning off that that bird might be dis- 

 entangled, taken to the fair ground woods and liberated. Boys 

 will fight, actually fight, for the protection of nests and birds 

 v.'hen a few years ago wings of the young of sparrows were pulled 

 off to see them suffer. The general spirit of observation, sym- 

 pathy, kindliness, charity, "seeing," "feeling," "love" has been 

 abroad in the Indiana School and the bird is the progenitor. 



They believe with Van Dyke, that, "There is more of God in 

 the peaceable beauty of the little wood-violet than in all the 

 angry disputations of the sects." That, "We are nearer heaven 

 when we listen to the birds than when we quarrel with our 

 fellow-men." They have felt with Ruskin, that, "The greatest 

 thing a human soul ever did was to 'see' something; that to 'see' 

 clearly was poetry, prophecy, and religion all in one." While 

 they have a weak will to appeal to it does not follow that the 

 emotions are equally infirm ; for the heart after all "sees" and 

 the heart "feels" and the heart "knows," and a heart can not 

 be feeble-minded. 



