175 
falls upon them. As we pass under the open window, we hear 
in a soft low voice the following words: 
pa een 3 earliest thoughts are linked with thee; 
ight of thee calls back the robin’s song, 
ai nae the a old tree 
Beside the door, sang bee all day long, 
And I, secure in childish piet 
Listen as if { heard an pee sing 
it n, 
Fresh every day to my untainted ears, 
When birds and flowers and I were happy peers." 
Murvin A. BECKER. 
Morris HIGH SCHOOL, 
New York Clty, 
NATURE STUDY IN LONDON. 
Recognition of the educational value of nature study might 
at first sight appear to have come almost too late, when by far 
the larger number of the children of England are now born and 
brought up in great cities. Nature study in its full educational 
sense involves a good deal more than visits to museums or indoor 
lectures, though both may be of great assistance; and many 
teachers in city schools may well have looked round them rather 
disconsolately for opportunities of contact with living nature, 
when the benefits of this kind of training first began to be gen- 
erally recognized. But great towns are by no means so deficient 
in natural life as the casual spectacle of their vastness and aridity 
might suggest. Parks, public gardens and the collections of 
living birds and animals which are kept in many of them provide 
fairly ample opportunities for intelligently directed study and 
observation; and, over and above the plants and animals which 
are preserved and tended by human care, all such ornamental 
open spaces, as well as many mere wastes left by the builder, 
become the asylum of many wild species. 
London, though the greatest of all great cities, is strikingly 
rich in records of wild species which have occurred within its 
boundaries. It is well provided with gardens and spots of ver- 
dure, as great cities go; and its fauna and flora are constantly 
