BIOLOGY IN ITS WIDER ASPECTS 1357 



direct contact with life and inspiration from it, that the living 

 spirit of humanism has so often fallen to the dead letter, and the 

 appreciation of science been so much arrested at the mechanistic 

 level ? 



OCCUPATIONAL EDUCATION.- -We have ventured to speak 

 thus strongly, and at such length, on education biologically and 

 humanly considered, not only from our long life as teachers, but 

 on various other grounds. Thus notably by watching the rapid 

 growth of the Boy Scout Organisation, which was latel}^ celebrating 

 (1929) its coming of age, and increase towards a third million of 

 membership; and, what is far more important, its remarkable 

 development from an at first too militaristic spirit to one of peace- 

 making internationalism; and with more and more of real and 

 vital education, as in open-air geography and nature-study, in 

 occupational experience, and in social service. We note too the rise 

 and growth of kindred groups, as yet smaller, but each in its own 

 way making its kindred contribution to educational progress, e.g. 

 Girl Guides, Seton Indians, Woodcraft Chivalry, Kibbo Kift, etc. 

 As naturalists we have also in our own environments been able to 

 encourage our own boys and girls and a few others to such pursuits, 

 thus supplementing (indeed, in several cases largely superseding) 

 their conventional schooling, and advancing their college studies; 

 and we are thus experimentally encouraged by the immediate life- 

 facts, that these young folk have each and all grown up into effective- 

 ness, in natural science or its professional applications. 



Leaving them to express themselves in their own careers, we may 

 briefly summarise the education — largely the self-education — of the 

 one lost to us in the war. From childhood home of widest outlook 

 over one of the most picturesque of cities and its landscapes from snows 

 to sea, and with summers in kindred ones, and thus more of real (and 

 less of book) geography than usual, he early grasped the there manifest 

 conception of the Valley-Region, small or great, as the essential unit 

 for wider world-knowledge; and this to be acquired by widening out 

 of excursions, and by and by in further travel. Next came interest in 

 the varied work going on at different levels; so in time not only from 

 sea up to snows and back again, but to an ever-keener admiration of 

 its workers — "men who can do things" — whence ambitions alike to 

 learn to work with them, and to know them better. Thus, with little 

 experience of schools (save for most of a year at our village school, 

 and one at a famous one, so avoiding isolation in either social class) — 

 his youth was essentially characterised by the happiest variety of occu- 

 pations; and thus from earliest helping of mother, in household or as 

 errand boy, and helping father in the garden, to laboratory- boy and in 

 each of our departments, of botany, with much in field and garden, 

 and of zoology by the sea. He thus came to know fairly well not only 

 the two fine valley-regions of Forth and Tay within his ordinary 



