NATURE 



[August i8, 1910 



specialised and valuable, though restricted, branch of agri- 

 culture — there are many other questions of interest to the 

 physiologist. Thus it is a very common practice to castrate 

 male animals in order to increase their docility and their 

 capacity for laying on flesh. Ovariotomy of the females is 

 also practised, though much less commonly, but with the 

 same object. Abortion is another matter to which attention 

 is directed. Enormous amounts of money are involved in 

 these stock-breeding problems, and in addition many of 

 them are of considerable physiological importance. 



The Agncullural Sti(dcnis' Gazette, the organ of the 

 Royal Agricultural College, Cirencester, contains articles 

 by old students or members of the staff dealing with 

 questions of general agricultural interest. Mr. B. Bathurst 

 writes on tariff reform and the tenant farmer, and Mr. 

 Boulgcr on the biology of the soil. The scientific work of 

 the college is published in a separate bulletin, which has 

 already been reviewed in these columns. 



THE EDUCATIONAL VALUE OF THE SCHOOL 

 GARDEN.^ 



TT is becoming increasingly common for rural elementary 

 -*■ schools to start a garden in which the scholars may 

 take a certain number of lessons during the season. The 

 idea of a school garden appeals to the village community ; 

 the village critic is nothing if not practical, and he insists, 

 and with a good show of reason, that if book-learning is 

 any good at all it ought to teach a man how to raise 

 onions and potatoes well. So successful has the move- 

 ment been that it has spread widely, and has reached a 

 stage when the whole question of tlie relation of garden- 

 ing to rural education may usefully be considered. 



The circular before us contains a highly suggestive dis- 

 cussion of the place of the garden in the school curriculum. 

 The garden, it is pointed out, makes two very powerful 

 appeals to those who wish education in our public 

 elementary schools to be more practical ; it leads to the 

 formation of habits of thoroughness, and it is eminently 

 useful. But it may also be dealt with on a much 

 higher plane. The purpose of the garden should be to 

 educate boys and girls, and not merely to show them the 

 usual ways of cultivating the common vegetables and 

 flowers, or to practise' them in the manual operations of 

 gardening. The scholar must be led to understand the 

 reasons of the common processes in their relation to the 

 soil and climate, the causes and conditions of health or 

 disease in plants, and something of the principles on which 

 the_ selection and improvement of seeds and plants depend. 

 It is, indeed, a branch of nature-study rather than a train- 

 ing for a profession, and it has two great advantages over 

 many other branches : it produces visible and tangible 

 results — thereby appealing forcibly to the utilitarian 

 instincts of the child — and it does not, or should not, 

 degenerate into the series of disconnected object-lessons 

 of little educational value that sometimes passes under the 

 name of nature-study. 



Gardening has another great advantage over other sub- 

 jects in that it is essentially experimental. Set experi- 

 ments cannot easily be made because the areas are far 

 too small for inequalities of the ground to be smoothed 

 out ; indeed, they may be wholly misleading. But through- 

 out the scholar is trying and trying again, observing his 

 results, attempting to account for his failures and to 

 devise better methods for the future. The teacher has to 

 strike the happy mean between doing too much for the 

 scholars, thus relieving them of the responsibility of 

 thinking, and of doing too little, and leaving them over- 

 whelmed with a sense of failure. 



Of course, the garden is not necessarily a success. If 

 the teacher has no taste for gardening or nature-study he 

 had much better let them alone ; he will save himself a 

 good deal of discredit and the children a good deal of 

 trouble. There is no particular virtue in a wide curri- 

 culum. If the subjects are treated in a dry and illiberal 

 fashion, no appeal is made to the child's natural interests 

 and his imagination is left untouched, in spite of the range 



' '^ueEeslions for the Consideration of Te.-irher* and otlieri c-n^erned in 

 the Work of Public Elementary Schools, (Circular 746 of the Board of 

 Education.) 



of the syllabus. Oji the other hand, a restricted choice of 

 subjects liberally treated may have great educational value. 

 It all turns on the teacher himself ; his choice of material 

 must be largely determined by what interests him most. 



In order to get the fullest value out of the gardening 

 lesson, it should be correlated as much as possible with 

 the other school work — with drawing, arithmetic, composi- 

 tion, nature-study, and so on. A number of hints are 

 given showing how this may be done. 



The publication is very interesting, and shows a lively 

 appreciation by the Board of the possibilities of the case. 

 A teacher who works in accordance with the spirit of these 

 suggestions will do some distinctly useful work. 



THE TELEGRAPHY OF PHOTOGRAPHS, 

 WIRELESS AND BY WIRE.' 



T T frequently happens that when two alternate processes 

 are available for certain work, and one of them is 

 considerably less practical than the other, the less practical 

 one is possessed of much higher scientific interest. This 

 may certainly be said of the telegraphy of pictures and 

 photographs. The whole of the methods of transmission 

 can be classed as either purely mechanical or dependent 

 on the physical properties of some substance which, like 

 si'lenium. is sensitive to light. 



The latter methods are of no little scientific interest, 

 and, although very delicate and for the moment obsolete, 

 there is every likelihood of their coming into more 

 extended use later on. 



The telegraphy of pictures differs only from the trans- 

 mission of ordinary messages in that the telegraphed 

 signals, recorded by a marker on paper, must essentially 

 occupy a fixed position. In the case of an ordinary 

 telegram, it matters little whether the received message 

 occupy two, three, or more lines when written out on 

 paper, but when a picture is telegraphed every component 

 part of it must be recorded in a definite position on the 

 paper. 



Suppose you greatly enlarge a portrait, and divide it up 

 by ruled lines into a thousand square parts. Suppose, also, 

 that the photograph is printed on celluloid, so that it is 

 transparent. If, now, the portrait be held in front of some 

 even source of illumination, it will be seen that each square 

 — each thousandth part — is of different density. The light 

 parts of the photograph will consist of squares of little 

 density, the dark parts of squares of greater density, and 

 so on. In this way the photograph is analysed into com- 

 posite sections, each section corresponding precisely to a 

 letter in a message ; letters and spaces recombined form 



ripliv-ered at the Royal Insl 



Friday, .April 



,^y 



NO. 2129, VOL. 84] 



