28 Education through Nature 



The care of animals, and the cultivation of plants, 

 lead to an intimate knowledge of biological laws, such 

 as can be gained through experience alone. This 

 empirical knowledge never becomes scientific, how- 

 ever, as it is acquired unconsciously and incidentally 

 rather than intentionally. Yet it is doubtless to such 

 empirical knowledge of plants and animals, of the de- 

 pendence of the seasons upon the movements of the 

 heavenly bodies, of qualities of soil as being deter- 

 mined by its chemical and organic ingredients, etc.., 

 that modern science owes its beginning. 



5. The Industrial and Commercial Stage. This 

 stage is characterized by a high specialization of 

 economic activities. Much of the domestic manufac- 

 ture of the agricultural stage is now given over to 

 special manufacturing agencies. Country life is re- 

 stricted to few kinds of work. By the invention of 

 machinery, farm life is reduced to a mere routine of 

 sowing and harvesting. Work, other than this of 

 sowing and reaping and feeding of stock, is trans- 

 ferred to factories, around which spring up great 

 centers of population. These are often entirely cut 

 off from the rural districts, save by a highly artificial 

 system of transportation and exchange. 



Within these centers of population all is art in the 

 sense that very few of the original physical conditions, 

 such as soil, water, pure air, and sunshine, remain. 

 Labor is specialized. The individual is narrowed to 

 the mechanical performance of a single kind of work, 

 exercising perhaps only a limited number of faculties. 

 It is in these centers of population, amid the nervous 

 stress of a highly developed commercial life and of a 

 highly complex social life, that the need for a return 

 to nature is most strongly felt. None, however, realize 

 fully the effects of these enervating influences who 

 have never known what country life and real personal 

 contact with nature is. 



