THE SPIRIT OF NATURE STUDY 71 



to, and to trust to luck for the trips. This shrinking from 

 a little sacrifice of comfort is very common, and makes 

 nature study so unsatisfactory that it becomes an increasing 

 burden to the teacher and to the pupil. 



Persistence is needed also in the successful formulation 

 of many exercises. They must be repeated over and over 

 in different ways before they become satisfactory, and some 

 of them call for no little ingenuity, especially those that 

 call for experimental work. Suggestions from books and 

 from other teachers never meet all the perplexities, and 

 one must persistently devise things for oneself. 



There are teachers of no experience or training in nature 

 study, but with enthusiasm and persistence, who have 

 worked over .their local material until they are perfectly 

 familiar with its possibilities, who have devised all sorts of 

 useful schemes for interesting the children in uncovering 

 it, and who have accumulated a stock of most suggestive 

 experiments. In short, they are exceedingly successful; 

 perhaps more so than if their opportunities for training 

 had been greater. There are other teachers of high train- 

 ing whose lack of persistence makes them shrink at every 

 trouble, even the trouble of devising something that they 

 had not learned. It is not the training nearly so much as 

 the spirit that makes for success in this work, and since it 

 is still experimental work, all the teachers who can think 

 and devise should feel compelled to do so. 



In many of the most useful problems in nature study 

 it is necessary to carry on observations throughout the 

 year or through successive years. The observation of the 

 same plant or bird or insect at different seasons develops 

 the conception of life histories, which is far more im- 



