1356 LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



knows much of "the best that has been thought and done in the 

 world", but is too easily content without in turn doing the like. 

 But culture has also to be more literally understood, more realisti- 

 cally applied, in its full sense; that is, of steady activity, towards 

 aiding growth to its fullness, flower to its beauty, fruit to its per- 

 fection. The botanist values his herbarium, and uses it with due 

 scholarship; yet he rightly understands it as hortus siccus: and 

 so he tiUs and tends his botanic garden into the very cynosure of 

 his city; while in the yet more skilful cultures of the florist, he and 

 his flowers go on surpassing themselves year by year. 



Such experimental cultures avoid too current limitations, as of 

 those who insist too exclusively on nature or on nurture, on character 

 or on environment, by combining their respective half-truths, and 

 making the best of both; day by day, season by season, year by 

 year. Thus while the florist and the cerealist, as the super-eugenists 

 they are, are ever giving us improved seeds, there is no more 

 impressive lesson towards their right treatment than that of growing 

 a row of seeds of such good stock in "culture-solutions", of which 

 only one has all the necessar\^ soil elements, and all others are 

 deficient, yet each only in some one essential. For thus all our 

 seedlings — save that of complete soil-environment, and consequent 

 normal development — soon show pathological states, and these 

 quite characteristic for each deficiency. Similarly too for the experi- 

 mental supply, or limitation, of other needed conditions of environ- 

 ment, as of light or temperature, water or air. In such ways are 

 preparing great contributions from organic culture-processes to 

 those of human life; and these can far more readily be applied in 

 schools than as yet in village, town, or city, awakenings though 

 these also begin to show. So if our culture of Nature's children be 

 thus already attaining such associated perfection as in our best 

 gardens, and with individual developments surpassing previous 

 records, what may not be the culture of the childhood and youth 

 of humanity at their best, and as guided into more complete and 

 appropriate conditions and utilisations of environment; with 

 appreciatively sympathetic and skilled discernment and evolution 

 of their own latencies and potentialities, and thus to higher levels 

 than our own. In this progressive perfecting of education, with its 

 vast and varied collaboration of educationists and their culture- 

 resources — at present strongest upon the humanistic side, or some- 

 times in the mathematico-physical sciences — we make no criticism 

 of exclusion, but plead for yet wider inclusiveness. Hence in this 

 must be urged claims as yet far too little satisfied — those of Nature- 

 studies and Nature-activities, as fundamentally educative in and 

 from childhood, and as preparatory to fuller knowledge of life in 

 later years. For thus education becomes more living, more truly 

 developmental and evolutionary. Indeed is it not for lack of this 



