112 First Conference 



with either of these, yet destined to stimulate and 

 vitalize both of them. For a freshened outlook upon 

 nature naturally leads to a more vital activity in it; 

 that is to say, it produces a greater fitness for occu- 

 pations also. Nor have the older literary studies 

 anything to fear: it is the child -naturalist who is 

 soonest ready for the nature poets; and the adoles- 

 cent truant, weary of grammar, may be brought back 

 to Virgil by help of Wordsworth or Tennyson, 

 Thoreau or Whitman, through Jefferies' meadows, or 

 by watching the bees with Lubbock or Maeterlinck. 



The modern revival of philology and the humani- 

 ties on one hand, the recent demands of scientific 

 and geographical instruction on the other, are thus 

 no real "conflict of studies"; they are a return to- 

 wards their completeness and harmony — a true and 

 literal renaissance of the Renaissance, a renewal of 

 that living interest at once in Nature and in Man 

 which was the glory of Greece. The apparent maze 

 of specialisms has to be threaded, the difficulty of 

 overcrowding has to be met; the latter by better 

 pedagogic methods, the former by the correlation of 

 studies. For both these purposes Nature-study and 

 geography are of special service. 



Here, then, we are literally entering into the fruits 

 of the teaching of Rousseau, of the labours of Pes- 

 talozzi and Froebel. Here, literally and concretely, 

 is that " Return to Nature" which the first prophesied, 

 which the latter practised; and this, which the last 

 generation has in considerable measure adopted and 

 applied in the kindergarten, is now and here be- 

 coming fully, even officially, organized for primary 

 and secondary schools also. The kindergarten and 



