Mr. Hall's Address 195 



of our enthusiasm about new work, we are apt to run 

 into extremes and lose sight of the educational side. 

 As teachers it has been impressed upon you that you 

 must have lessons about the country; you find them, 

 and the children find them, very pleasant, very 

 interesting, very pretty, but that is not enough. You 

 have only to go round the present exhibition to see 

 how much of the work that is being done lacks any 

 guiding idea. Mere collecting of natural objects, mere 

 sketching, mere copying of notes dictated by the 

 teacher: these things are worth just as much, or rather 

 as little, in connection with Nature as with, let us say, 

 foreign stamps. Nor do we want what someone has 

 cruelly called *' sugar-coated pills of science " — pretty 

 little lessons about this or that natural object or 

 process, — the chief aim must be method, and the 

 practical logic of cause and effect that comes from 

 seeing how one thing develops naturally from another. 

 I want the teacher, when he starts this new work, to 

 realize the importance of thinking out beforehand a 

 course that shall be truly systematic and consecutive, 

 so that one part of the subject grows out of the other, 

 and the whole binds itself together with the last 

 lesson dependent upon the first. Just in the same 

 way, you must not suppose that in this Nature-teach- 

 ing it is sufficient to read about animals, plants, 

 and flowers — to go back to books. Already text- 

 books have begun to flow into the market. There 

 are text-books which describe how swallows fly and 

 sparrows chirp — and not always correctly, — and the 

 child will read the description, and forget to look at 

 the animal or bird and see that it does not do what 

 the text-book tells him. Leave those text- books 



