Lessons in the Field. 145 



are directed and which must be taken up systematically, consists 

 of interesting facts having climatic causes. The children do not 

 study them as such, because they do not know what climate 

 is. They, however, associate them in climatic categories while 

 studying them, thus being helped to understand climate, its 

 causes and effects logically, when later, they study the subject 

 for that purpose. They observe the coming and going of birds 

 and note the time of the year of each ; they observe the birds 

 that do not leave and the kinds of homes that each species build ; 

 they observe the coming of snow, the coming of flowers, and 

 the length of the days with each of these times of year, and 

 learn to associate them as correlated facts, but not as cause and 

 effect. They are yet too young to know the distinction. This 

 group of phenomena is large, interesting and valuable for edu- 

 cative purposes. Like other groups to which I have called 

 attention, it must be passed after alluding to it enough in detail 

 to make its character and purpose understood to the hearer. 



Our children have now grown strong in their power to see, so 

 purposive have been the steps by which their observation has 

 been directed. They are next taken to the fields to observe the 

 decay of rocks, the making of soil, the running of streams, the 

 washing of hillsides, the making of valleys, the denuding of 

 hilltops, and the numerous other phenomena which the casual, 

 uncultivated reader does not see, cannot see, but which the 

 student of geography should be trained to see before he is allowed 

 to proceed further in the study. Much of this work is done 

 in the school-room, involving the examination of rocks, the 

 examination of pebbles, and the study of the causes of their 

 forms. Miniature coal mines are made to appear in the school- 

 room ; the different kinds of coal are examined (the ' causes 

 for the existence of different kinds of coal need not trouble 

 us at this time) ; the different kinds of rock— shale, sandstone, 

 'etc, may be studied advantageously in the school-room. The 

 purpose of this is to give information and especially to open the 

 eyes of the children and to put them in a proper intellectual 

 attitude to their surroundings, when, for any cause, they go into 

 the fields or onto the hill-tops. 



During the progress of the study of this last unit the children 

 learn many valuable geographic facts, facts that are valuable as 

 interpreters in their further reading and as nuclei in their fur- 

 ther acquisition of geographic information. vSome of these are 



. 20— Nat. Geog. Mag , vol. V, 1893. 



