222 Fourth Conference 



may expect to turn out resourceful or resourceless 

 teachers. Some teachers can do no better than to 

 get up all their lessons out of books, and to illustrate 

 them, if at all, by bought appliances. There are 

 teachers who depend entirely upon lantern -slides, 

 models, and other things which should be unim- 

 portant accessories. Such teachers are likely to be 

 mechanical in all their methods, dictating notes to 

 their classes, and making it a chief point to get the 

 technical names spelt right. Where native aptitude 

 is aided by good training, we may hope now and then 

 to turn out a real teacher of Nature, who brings a 

 fresh eye and a fresh curiosity to every lesson. He 

 has the air of expecting that very day to learn some 

 new thing. He becomes by experience full of know- 

 ledge, full of resource, but even more eager to learn 

 than when the whole of Nature lay before him as an 

 unstudied book. 



NATURE-STUDY IN GIRLS' SECONDARY 

 SCHOOLS 



By Miss MARY GURNEY, Member of the Council of 

 THE Girls' Public Day-School Company 



"We plant a solid foot into the Time." — Tennyson^ " The Princess". 



I believe that the great changes of the last thirty 

 years in the education of girls have laid the founda- 

 tion for the interest now shown in Nature-study. 

 The higher education of girls is placed upon a new 

 footing; girls have been taught to think and to make 

 use of their senses, to handle and to observe. With 



