Professor Thomson's Address 125 



one, the advantages are obviously great, but I must 

 confess to some misgivings on the subject — partly 

 based on twenty years of experimenting. These 

 misgivings have led me to restrict this brief paper to 

 an illustration of that method — the seasonal method 

 — which I have found to give the most encouraging 

 results. 



Allow me very shortly to hint at the nature of my 

 misgivings. 



I am afraid lest in our enthusiasm for Nature-study 

 we under-appreciate the difficulties of the problem 

 and the danger of doing the business badly. The 

 danger is a very real one; for while the teaching of 

 grammar, for instance, may be very bad indeed, one 

 never hears of serious ill-effects, whereas bad educa- 

 tion in nature-lore means a distortion of the child's 

 outlook on the world. Given a man or woman with 

 the mood of the naturalist — a country school-master 

 who knows and loves the birds, a country school- 

 mistress who knows and loves the flowers — then the 

 course of Nature-study, now compulsory, is sure to be 

 healthful. But given a teacher, who through over- 

 work, or preoccupation with other disciplines, or lack 

 of early training, is only coercively, not organically, 

 interested in nature-lore, then I should fear that the 

 results will be very bad indeed. To a certain extent 

 this badness is the Nemesis of trying to educate too 

 cheaply, of expecting too much from an underpaid 

 teacher with a niggardly allowance for class-material, 

 but this is surely curable; to a certain extent it must 

 be the result of asking a teacher to instruct in a sub- 

 ject which he has never really learned, but this is 

 being rapidly cured; to a certain extent it is the 



