lo4 NATURE-STUDY REVIEW [12:4— April, 1916 



soon discovered that, though it was impossible to teach the chil- 

 dren at first-hand in the woods, these books, with the aid of act- 

 ual material brought into the class-room, made things almost as 

 vivid, and in addition the children learned to describe what they 

 saw. In other words, by rubbing Aladdin's lamp of imagination 

 they could be transported from their sordid surroundings to fresh 

 fields and the genie, under the name of John Burroughs, would 

 go with them and give his very own word to help them describe the 

 vision. 



This by-product of expression soon assumed an importance 

 equal to the nature knowledge, for it became apparent that the 

 spoken and written language of these children, mostly foreign 

 born, was improving because of their close study of the clear, 

 simple language of John Burroughs. Soon his phrases were in- 

 corporated in their vocabularies. For example, a 4B girl, 13 

 years old and foreign born, upon seeing a picture of a lonely 

 Adirondack Lake, exclaimed: "Oh, that just shows the wild- 

 ness and solitariness of nature." The previous month her class 

 had answered the question: "How does the loon represent the 

 wildness and solitariness of nature?," and this is what she had 

 written : 



A Lonely Bird of the Northern Lakes. 



"Come and travel with me to the great northern solitary lakes. 

 There you may feast your eyes. Look how she flies in the air! 

 Listen a moment! Do you hear her scream? Does it sound 

 like the robin or the blue- jay? No! Do you see her now? I 

 don't. She swooped down into the water. Mother Nature has 

 put her just where she belongs. Her weird and doleful cry awak- 

 ens the echoes. She is also full of wildness and solitariness. Can 

 you guess her name? She is called the loon. 



"She has great fiery eyes gleaming from her jet-black head; 

 they are full of meaning. She has a white breast. Her legs are 

 in back and her wings are in front; she has the fur of an animal 

 and the feathers of a bird, and the heart of both. She builds 

 her nest of grass and reeds along the margin of a lake. 



"Her food consists of lizards, fishes, and water insects. When 

 she catches a fish, she swoops under the water and there she 

 eats it. 



"In winter she travels south; in summer she breeds in the north. 

 She travels so far and is never tired. I am going to tell you 

 what Mr. Brvant has said about a bird like this. 



