28 THE NATURE STUDY COURSE. 



All animals need food and water and their cages of whatever 

 kind should be kept clean. Those named above feed upon 

 insects, worms, and other kinds of animal food which they 

 usually take alive. When fed artificially with bits of fresh 

 meat the food has usually to be forced into their mouths. 



Apparatus. — The time to make an experiment is when the 

 need for it arises. Whether true or not of science, it is true 

 of Nature Study that experiments should not be made for the 

 mere sake of making them. The pupils should participate, if 

 possible, in both the devising and the construction of the 

 apparatus. If there arises the question, for example, whether 

 drained soils warm more quickly than undrained ones, the 

 teacher instead of telling the pupils how to find the answer 

 experimentally will lead them by such a way that they will 

 feel to be discoverers of the means of making nature decide 

 the point. If it be desired to learn whether young plants 

 grow faster in drained than in undrained soils and it is deter- 

 mined to suspend fine stems of grass or thin splinters of wood 

 at an inch from the end attached to the leaves while the free 

 end acts as a swinging pointer, the construction and setting up 

 of the apparatus should be done by the pupils under the 

 teacher's supervision. The total value of the lesson at the 

 Nature Study stage will then be greater than if an expensive 

 auxanometer had been used. Under the stimulus of interest 

 begotten of the desire to find out or prove something the 

 exercise of devising an experiment and constructing the 

 apparatus is often more educative or more valuable than the 

 knowledge gained. Very little factory-made apparatus is 

 needed in Nature Study work. 



Collections. — The children might well nigh convert their 

 schoolroom into a natural history museum without doing 

 much real Nature Study. Mounted skeletons, stuffed skins, 

 embalmed corpses, pinned insects and dried plants may be 

 very useful to pupils at the stage of scientific classification ; 



