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and easily studied. During late fall and winter, when 

 living nature sleeps, rocks and soil, water and its forms, 

 air and winds, and elementary physics may take the 

 attention of the child. In all, that should be first 

 selected which is most common, most a part of the 

 child's every day life, which will best lead him to think 

 about, and help him to understand, his surroundings. 

 Later, as his world enlarges, what he has learned about 

 his immediate environment will help him to understand 

 that which is more distant, and become a basis for com- 

 parison and classification. 



Nature study will not have the best success, unless 

 it sets the child at work studying nature out-of-doors, 

 under natural conditions, as well as in the school-room. 

 It must be a means of bringing out-of-doors into the 

 school and of carrying the school out of doors, of bind- 

 ing together all the child's environment. As the child 

 studies in school that in which he has become so inter- 

 ested out of doors, as he goes to nature to investigate 

 that which he has studied in school, all his environ- 

 ment becomes his school, as nature intended it should 

 be. In this work nothing will be more profitable than 

 occasional excursions, not picnics, but field lessons, 

 more carefully planned and conducted than any lesson 

 in school. Nothing, I believe, will draw teacher and 

 pupils nearer together than to thus become fellow stu- 

 dents of nature, fellow-workers in the investigation of 

 truth, under conditions where all are teachers and all 

 pupils. In the field the poorest pupil in school may be 

 the best teacher. 



The student must not merely observe ; he must learn 

 to express himself through language and drawing and 



