94 NATURE-STUDY REVIEW [14:3— Mar., 1918 



Then, again, one feels the unconscious longing of the children 

 when, taking them into the country, a little girl holds up a flower 

 and says, "See how pretty it smells," or taken even to the park, 

 she says in a shocked voice as she pulls the teacher's dress, "She's 

 stepping on the grass." How much such little incidents tell to 

 one ready to understand them. The "tin-can lot" and the water 

 in the gutter are such poor substitutes for the glories of the woods, 

 the meadow and the brook in all their springtime gladness. Can 

 we expect the child who has grown up with the need of always 

 closing his eyes to his surroundings to open them understandingly 

 to admire the beauty of the country? The most it can mean to 

 many city boys is an open space in which to play ball without 

 being chased by a "cop", or a shady nook in which to read. Can 

 we expect these boys to hear the small voices of nature? And 

 yet, we owe it to the generation growing up in our cities, to give 

 them an appreciative sense of their dependence upon the country, 

 and thus to give them a better understanding of their own sur- 

 roundings. Sardines do not always live in flat tins, nor do peas 

 grow in the cans on the grocer's shelf, and yet that is the only 

 form in which many of our city children see them. 



Let us change all this. We must furnish some beautiful sur- 

 roundings; and then, with objects related to the child's every-day 

 experiences, thrown into an imitation of their native surroundings, 

 lead him to associate these common things with their whole 

 life history, the pop-corn in the bag with the plants in the field; 

 the house mouse with its relative, the field mouse; the fish in the 

 market with the fish in the schoolroom; the fish as food with 

 the living, breathing animal in its native brook or lake. 



Education must be a process of directed growth. It must make 

 the mind not a memoranda of facts, but the instrument of a 

 personality that appreciates and understands his daily surround- 

 ings. It is in this deepening and broadening of the understanding 

 that natural science offers a powerful weapon. Picture two busi- 

 ness men halted on a busy thoroughfare. The one scowls and 

 mutters. For him there is but one thing in life — business — always 

 business, and this is now hindered. The other looks around him 

 at the enforced delay and thinks, "The buds on that old maple 

 tree are surely swelling ; it will soon be in blossom." Which one 

 lives up to his own personality? The first is what even our 



