Patterson] PROGRESS IN NATURE-STUDY 57 



something with nature-study set her pupils to collecting all the 

 different kinds of birds' eggs they could find. There was wholesale 

 school-legalized robbing of birds' nests in that region for several 

 years following. 



Besides this kind of deplorable teaching much of the class work 

 was stupid and uninteresting. I visited a room while the teacher 

 was giving a lesson on the dandelion. This was in 1903. She 

 stood by her desk in froht of the room full of children. In her hand 

 she held one little flowering head of a dandelion. She asked ques- 

 tions about it which the children were supposed to answer from 

 observation. They made a few guesses which she accepted or 

 rejected, then she told them a few facts and the nature-study lesson 

 was done. The yard outside was full of dandelion plants in blossom 

 which held a world of interest to those children had the teacher 

 known how to use them. In most cases superintendents and 

 principals were quite as helpless in dealing with this new situation 

 as were the teachers upon whom they had thrust the burden. The 

 result was that in many localities nature-study was branded as a 

 fad and dropped from the curriculimi as a useless waste of pupils' 

 time. 



This is, I am glad to say, the dark side of the picture. In many 

 schools real nature-study was taught from the first. Teachers 

 became learners with their children and little by little the leaven 

 spread. One teacher in a system naturally adapted to the work 

 often became indirectly a teacher not only of her children but of her 

 fellow workers as well. She helped all of them to choose suitable 

 material found in the vicinity of the school. She, a real student of 

 nature, conducted field trips for teachers as well as pupils. She 

 suggested how the material collected could be used in the class- 

 room. If every school system could have had then, or could have 

 now, one of these enthusiastic naturalists the causes of nature-study 

 would advance much more rapidly than it has done. 



About this time, that is, in the later part of the nineties and early 

 in 1900, the leaders in nature-study realizing something of the 

 difficulties under which teachers were laboring began to publish 

 graded courses of study, with suggestions for teaching, and outline 

 lessons for the different grades. 



These appeared almost simultaneously in different parts of the 

 country. One of the earliest was A Manual of nature-study with 

 supplementary readers written by Mrs. Lucy Wilson of the Phila- 



