THE MISSION OF NATURE STUDY 19 



propriate dominant motive that must determine the meth- 

 od, we are at the parting of the ways where opinions 

 diverge. However, all these opinions must be tested in 

 the furnace of experience before any one of them can be 

 advocated with any boldness. 



The place of nature study in elementary education is 

 supplementary to what may be called the conventional 

 education. The latter of necessity compels attention to 

 certain abstractions of language and of numbers that are 

 not of paramount interest to the pupil at the time. Any 

 observation of young children shows that they reach out to 

 the tangible things of nature about them with eager curios- 

 ity. The normal child is evidently born with what may 

 be styled tentacles of inquiry by which he relates himself 

 to the world about him. It has been observed that a 

 strictly conventional education tends promptly to cause 

 atrophy of these tentacles through disuse, and when later 

 in life the opportunity for work in science presents itself 

 there is no response, for loss of interest has followed loss of 

 power. 



Tentacles of Inquiry. An actual test whose results are 

 indicative of such atrophy of these native tentacles of 

 inquiry and the substitution of artificial ones, if any, may 

 be of interest. Spring twigs bearing buds were given to 

 two groups of children. One group consisted of children 

 just entering school, the average age being six. The other 

 group consisted of children with six years of school ex- 

 perience, but with no nature study. Both groups were 

 asked to sketch what they saw. The results were sub- 

 mitted to an outsider to separate the good from the bad. 

 This was done without difficulty or even hesitation, for 



