50 NATURE-STUDY REVIEW [14:2— Feb., 1918 



approach it, and I know of no one who ideally attains it. The 

 most common approach to the ideal is secured when in a school 

 where there is good pedagogical training, the students also are 

 trained in nature-study under someone who has had distinct 

 scientific training. Accordingly, the people who are directing the 

 teaching of nature-study in the public schools, and the people who 

 are teaching, in our normal schools and universities, the students 

 who are later to teach nature-study, should have good scientific 

 training. 



Even in cases like this, the scientist who has constantly in mind 

 the upper portals of scientific knowledge, and is constantly think- 

 ing of a student as facing towards these portals and hoping fondly 

 to reach them, will hit wide of the mark when it comes to nature- 

 study. Nature-study is not a first step to cytology and morphol- 

 ogy, or to the systematic study of any group of animals or plants. 

 Nature-study is, on the other hand, a step towards a full and 

 appreciative sense of the meaning of ones environment in every-day 

 life. Of the students who begin nature-study, not one in five 

 hundred will ever study zoology even beyond the most elementary 

 text book, but all of them are going to live in contact at least with 

 a few animals and plants, even though they live in cities and their 

 contact is confined chiefly to such things as they find in parks or 

 while on the infrequent summer vacation. But the majority of 

 them will live in daily contact with trees and grass, with birds and 

 flowers, and with the domestic animals at least. A familiar 

 knowledge of the most obvious and most immediately interesting 

 things concerning these creatures will give to the life of the man 

 who lives amongst them an added richness which is the finest fruit 

 of contact with nature. 



On the other hand, the ease with which even good college stu- 

 dents forget within a few years most of what they gain from any 

 one of the higher branches, unless they continue the cultivation of 

 that branch either as a necessity of their business or as a relaxation, 

 is evidence enough not of the worthlessness of these things, for all 

 earnest, faithful study is good, but it should show us how useless 

 it is to make the ideas which are brought out only by the most 

 elaborate study the conscious goal of the beginnings of contact 

 and appreciation of nature. 



Another of the thorough and kindly aims of the scientist is to 

 do with reasonable thoroughness and completeness whatever he 



