157 
This attracted general attention and soon a mob was elbowing 
and pushing about the little old lady and the notice to see what 
it was all about. The mob lasted until a break in the procession 
broke it up. Similar crowds gathered at two other times during 
the next half hour; one of these I drew myself — by imitating 
the example of the little old lady. Aside from these contagious 
and congested moments, the notice received little or no attention. 
From the puzzled look upon the faces of children, it occurred to 
me that they were not able to read it intelligently. 
In order to determine the ability of children under twelve 
years of age to read and understand it, one of the regular notices 
of the Botanical Garden was sent to the Horace Mann School o 
Teachers College, Columbia University. The children of this 
school come from homes of culture and comfort ; they are accus- 
tomed to good English ; they speak and read well and understand- 
ingly. This was in no way designed to bea test of the children ; 
it was a test of the notice. The children looked upon the work 
asa kind of nice puzzle and did their best. We did the work 
during the regular nature-study periods of May 20 and 21, one 
week before the close of the school year. 
he notice was taken into the eleven rooms of the first five 
grades of the elementary school. It was not discussed at all in 
any room, but it was placed where all the children could see it, 
and they were asked to study it quietly for a certain length of 
time varying from five to two minutes. Then it was turned face 
to the wall and each child wrote what the notice meant to him 
In the first. grade, the children were sent individually into an 
adjoining room to report to me, for they were not old enough to 
write their answers; in the other four grades, the answers were 
written. The senee of this investigation is necessarily shortened 
to meet the requirements of this paper, but an effort has been 
made to be as just as possible in the selection of ten representa- 
tive answers from each grade; also the choice has been made 
with a view to the preservation of the relative proportion of cor- 
rect or false or absurd notions of each grade. 
