8 



This has been most forcibly impressed upon me by 

 my own experience. When, as a high school teacher, 

 I first became interested in the work with children, I 

 was fresh from the university laboratory, an enthusias- 

 tic student of morphology and anatomy, of form and 

 structure, and with the idea that nature only yielded 

 her secrets to the wielder of scissors and scalpel, to the 

 manipulator of section cutter and microscope. That I 

 could study nature, my own environment, in its naturul 

 condition, with my own natural eyes, had not been 

 suggested to me. When I became interested in get- 

 ting the children at work studying insects, with which 

 we happened to begin our nature study, I naturally 

 assumed that they would study as I had studied. I 

 had found the structure of the grasshopper intensely 

 interesting. So the children even in lower grades were 

 put to work studying, in considerable detail, the struc- 

 ture of the grasshopper. The grasshoppers carefully 

 and humanely killed were placed on their desk and they 

 were asked and helped to find out all about their struc- 

 ture, their body and head, their legs and wings and 

 other appendages. But they, and particularly the 

 younger pupils, were not much interested. They 

 handled the dead creatures in a very gingerly way, and 

 more so after they had been in alcohol some time. 

 They studied the insect carefully and thoroughly and, 

 still following the college method, compared the struct- 

 ure of the cricket with it. But, strange to say, most of 

 the pupils were disgusted with grasshopper and cricket 

 and nature study, and many teachers dreaded '" the 

 grasshopper hour." 



The study of the butterfly was much more success- 



