THE SCOPE OF NATURE-STUDY 39 



them. Instead of really contributing to the joy and movement 

 of home life, such decorations introduce a stiffness that always 

 exists between strangers. The parlor and " best rooms " become 

 places to be shunned, not enjoyed, and the real available portion 

 of the house for living purposes becomes narrowed down to those 

 regions where the work is actually done. 



This opens up at once the true function of the domestic arts. 

 Instruction in textiles, manual training, modeling, drawing, and 

 painting should at this point find easy entrance into the lives and 

 affections of the pupil, and nature-study properly presented should 

 furnish an inexhaustible supply of material and an endless variety 

 in design. It is useless to try to teach the relation of nature-study 

 to art until the pupils feel a need for the art — until they see a 

 place for it and begin to picture in their imagination what it can 

 do. The study of art usually begins in a gallery which is but a 

 warehouse and most people grow old and die without once realizing 

 that it can exist anywhere else. 



Homes that are made more livable through a greater sanity of 

 arrangement and decoration would react powerfully upon the social 

 relations. In many otherwise good communities the people are not 

 social because they dread each other's parlors ; whereas, if their 

 rooms expressed something of the actual joy that the people get 

 out of living, they would add immensely to the pleasures of social 

 intercourse. 



This phase of home life offers one of the easiest and most 

 obvious points of departure for the instruction of our pupils, but 

 it is one of the last to be discovered. If teachers were to devote 

 as much time to such instruction, were to bring to it the same 

 enthusiasm, the same use of pictures and books which they now 

 bring to the study of the houses of savages and of primitive men 

 of other days, their own homes and home life and the general social 

 condition would be almost revolutionized in a generation. 



VI. THE CITY. 



The most that has been said and written about nature-study has 

 been done with direct reference to the country. The city, however, 

 is no less a natural object than a tree or a fox. It belongs to the 

 earth ; it is as inseparable from it as a mountain range or a river, 

 and it should be studied in precisely the same way. Chicago is 



