44 HOW NATURE STUDY SHOULD BE TAUGHT 



said, " It is good." And he put the first man in 

 a garden, with the perfect beauty of nature sur- 

 rounding and embracing him. 



Show the child the beauty surrounding him, 

 provided you are sufficiently skillful and sufficiently 

 in love with that beauty to find it. But it is every- 

 where. You can teach the pupil to appreciate it, 

 although he may have no inherent love for so 

 called Natural History. The greatest artists are 

 rarely naturalists. The sculptor studies human 

 anatomy, not because he wants to be an anatomist, 

 but to make his work more nearly perfect. Ex- 

 patiate to your pupils on the beauty of nature. 

 Then show them some, and keep on showing them 

 if you want to do good work. We all crave the 

 beautiful. Even the paper on our wall is now 

 what we call artistic; even the iron register 

 through which the demon in the cellar dashes his 

 hot blasts, are made graceful and alluring to the 

 eye. We all crave beauty, when we have been 

 taught that there is such a thing outside of 

 heaven. 



Life, progress, and growth are always interest- 

 ing. We all like to watch a train leave the station, 

 men digging a cellar, carpenters building a house, 

 or a plant or an animal in its development. This 



