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THE NATURE STUDY COURSE. 



time and again as wholes in connection with the plants that 

 bore them ; their colors, forms, size, and perhaps their insect 

 visitors, have been noticed and commented upon. Forms, 

 arrangement, and names of the organs that compose flowers 

 may now be studied and compared. Beginners are interested 

 in flowers, not in carpels and filaments and stigmas. They 

 are not repelled by the technical terms ; on the contrary, most 

 children are rather partial to big words. When they are 

 mature enough to understand structure and function of these 

 organs, they will easily learn the names in the same way that 

 they learn the harder names of their playmates, by associating 

 name with object. From this stage it is but a short step, if 

 the teacher chooses that they take it, to elementary 

 classification. 



Discovering and generalizing the characteristics of hair, fur, 

 wool, feathers, and scales is as suitable exercise for pupils in 

 the Fourth and Fifth Forms as discovering the appropriateness 



of fur to the cat and hair to 

 the dog was to those in the 

 First Form. The child in the 

 First Form is interested in 

 the retractile claw of the cat 

 from the points of view of the 

 child's relation to the cat or 

 the advantage of the structure 

 to the cat itself. In this class 

 the pupil is probably more in- 

 terested in how the cat retracts 

 her claws and why the dog is 

 unable to do so. Hence the 

 skeleton of a familiar animal 

 that has been observed in life may now be more interesting 

 and educative than the living animal. 



Kitty's Claw.— A, the retracting tendon; 

 B, the extending tendon. 



