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THE BOOK OF NATURE STUDY 



an effective and interesting representative of each great class, 

 and by and by the school will have a storeroom from which 

 specimens can be drawn to replace those which have served their 

 time on the shelves of the exposed cupboard. It should be an 

 honour to a pupil to have a specimen which he has found deemed 

 worthy of being, for a time, the representative of fish or bird, 

 mollusc or insect in the school cupboard. 



As to the plan of the school cupboard, various lucid arrange- 

 ments are possible, and that will be best, ceteris paribus, which 

 the teacher devises for himself. Thus we have seen a fairly 

 successful and by no means dogmatic genealogical tree with the 

 animals some a little grotesquely perched on or hanging from 

 the branches. We suggest the following plan : 



Besides the general mapping out of the animal kingdom, 

 which should never require to be learned, but should rather be 

 unconsciously impressed by frequent looking at the orderly cup- 

 board, another general notion is that of gradual ascent. Why 

 do we say that a Mammal is " higher " than a fish and still 

 "higher" than a worm? We more or less consciously apply 

 two standards : the higher animals are more complex, with 

 greater division of labour, and they are more thoroughly unified 

 by the nervous system. The bird is a more complex engine than 

 an earthworm, and it has a more perfectly controlled unified life. 



