170 NATURE STUDY REVIEW [9:6— Sept., 1913 



that Cowbirds do patrol premises where they have deposited eggs, 

 and watch for a chance to get possession of their young, I was 

 compelled to vote my supposed Towhee a Cowbird. And so 

 much glory suddenly departed from him that instinctively I 

 named him Ichabod. 



When the Kingbird again coaxed him up higher, I let him stay. 

 A few minutes later an adult Cowbird perched beside him, and 

 after a bit of what seemed to be greeting, the two flew away. 



Had the Kingbird told the Cowbird where he could find one of 

 his foundlings? 



A Course in the Natural History of the Farm 



James G. Needham 



A chief function of nature-study is, and is to be, orientation. 

 Youth must get its bearings in the world of nature. Rightly to 

 gauge the fundamentals of one's relations to environment is no 

 longer easy, for conditions have grown artificial. Getting one's 

 living with a can-opener does not conduce tp a true appreciation 

 of sotirces in mother nature. It is fundamental for a sound basis 

 of procedure through life that the sources of our livelihood should 

 be rightly apprehended. Nattire-study is the best corrective 

 for the ills entailed by the artificialities of modem life. 



The students who are coming to college show in recent years 

 an increasing acquaintance with things out-of-doors — at least 

 this is true in New York State, where I meet in my own class room 

 a fresh lot of more than five hundred young New Yorkers ever}^ 

 year. They know on sight, at least, a few more birds and trees 

 and flowers than formerly, and they take an interest in some of 

 the wonderful processes of nature, such as the metamorphosis 

 of amphibians and of insects. Doubtless this interest is the 

 result of the effort expended in late years in nature-study extension. 

 The leaven is working. But these same students, even the best 

 of them, show a lamentable lack of appreciation of any relation 

 existing between their past natiu*e-work and the practical affairs 

 of life : still less relation between it and the studies in pure science 

 which chiefly occupy the earlier years of their college course. 



In the hope of helping to correlate these things, the writer, 

 at the suggestion of Director L. H. Bailey, began in the spring 



