278 NATURE-STUDY REVIEW [11:6— Sept., 1915 



(b) Lectures and talks before various civic and other 

 organizations. 



(3) Following this, bringing to the city a trained expert 

 organizer. 



The newspapers, as in the playground campaign, gave gener- 

 ously of their space. Photographs were pubUshed, one at a time, 

 about a week apart, accompanied by the stories of Okimoto, and 

 Alois, Hialmar and Hendrick. 



The Parent Teachers Associations were valuable aids. Little 

 by little friends were found who were missionaries. Germans, 

 Danes, Swiss who knew the value of the field excursions from 

 their own childhood were especially valuable in that word-of- 

 mouth creation of public opinion so well known to the old time 

 political boss. Under the latter 's leadership was organized selfish- 

 ness. Here was organized unselfishness — human betterment. 



Then the University of California was appealed to for an expert. 

 This institution had been co-operating with the State Fish and 

 Game Commission. The latter was systematizing permanent 

 wild life conservation. 



They responded sympathetically. The slogan about reading 

 a roadside was directly in accord with their policy to substitute 

 a love of the wild life, for the game destroying tendencies of the 

 old generation of Calif ornians, who had mined gold, broken the 

 virgin soil, and cut the forests. 



It was a policy to largely substitute the camera and the field 

 glass of the bird lover for the gun. It was a policy which, stamped 

 upon the plastic child mind, the fact that it was lots more fun to 

 study through a glass a titmouse feeding its nestlings than to 

 shoot it. 



So the school authorities, the Fish and Game Commission, 

 the University and the Chamber of Commerce City Planners are 

 working together. Dr. Bryant is organizing both teachers and 

 pupils, so far with unexpected success. Grownups, as well as 

 lads and lassies, are learning that a roadside can be read as well 

 as a book, that such reading is more fim than a circus. An official 

 of the Fish and Game Commission said the other day — ^"If this 

 continues we will have the nature study field excursions in every 

 school in California. Can we not look forward expectantly to 

 the time, perhaps one or two generations hence, when every Ameri- 

 can child will, like the yellow-haired blue-eyed bairns of Denmark — 



