20 THE THIRD YEARBOOK 



from the fact that each represents a concession of the organism to 

 the same controlHng cause found in Hght. A large number of 

 landscape phenomena, therefore, may be grouped together, from 

 which there will be formed an image of related parts representing 

 the effects of light. Another group of phenomena will be referred 

 in the same way to heat, another to moisture, another to soil, and 

 so on. The channeling of the grass blade and the bladdery vesicles 

 of submerged plants as isolated facts are of little importance. But 

 when one is recognized as a dew-spout and the other as a swim- 

 bladder, and that both are an attempt to make friends with water, 

 they become the organized parts of an image that is fundamental 

 in the study of botany. Imaging thus begun opens the way to 

 endless study. Simple enough in the outset to be clear to the child, 

 the last step in scientific research is but the latest attempt of the 

 trained mind to define more clearly the same image. 



The chief reason why observation is slow and tedious is that 

 sufficient aid in defining the image is not given through adequate 

 expression. Expression is usually confined to one or two modes, 

 whereas observation furnishes the data for a many-sided image 

 which may need all the modes of expression to define it properly. 

 People are continually wrestling with form, but they have almost 

 no training in the development of form through the production of 

 a model. They are continually called upon to distinguish colors, 

 but expression through color has been practically unknown to most 

 adults of the present time. Even in oral and written expression 

 the pupils are enormously delayed by being compelled to deal with 

 these modes in the beginning from the side of technique rather than 

 from that of content. It seems to require endless time for teachers 

 to learn that it is content which furnishes the motive to define an 

 image, that must control technique in every form of expression. To 

 attempt to teach technique beyond the demand of image-growth, or 

 apart from it, is both to destroy the growth and defeat the real pur- 

 pose of art-study. Even in most schools where the various modes 

 of expression are employed the desultory character of the work 

 growing out of and coupled with a corresponding desultory kind 

 of observation tends to dissipate, rather than to conserve and 

 strengthen, the pupil's power to image. If observation is of the 

 highest educational character, the imagination is constantly called 

 upon to arrange the different parts of the growing image in the 



