370 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 



Dr. LeConte, of California, says : " Natural History cannot be taught with- 

 out laboratories, museums, aquariums, and zoological and botanical gardens, all 

 of which are expensive. Nor can it be taught except in small classes, by direct 

 personal contact of teachers with pupil and both with nature; and this requires 

 much time and a superior order of teachers." 



It has been well said that the chief business of the naturalist at the present 

 time is to know how to compare and observe. Prof. Crosby has said : "The great 

 want of educational system is method and not knowledge." To meet this want, 

 it may be said that among all of value the lamented Agassiz has contributed to 

 science, there is perhaps nothing more valuable than his method of instruction. 

 His object was to develop professional naturalists, and to teach his students to ob- 

 serve and think for themselves, the first requisites to an acquaintance with nature. 

 At first a specimen was placed in the student's hands with no other instruction 

 than that he find out by inspection all he can about it, and express the informa- 

 tion he gains by drawing and describing it. To each student, as far as possible, 

 was given a different subject, in order that he might work independently. As 

 soon as he showed himself capable, he was set to work on some special problem 

 in connection with his subject, in which he was to determine, by rigid compari- 

 son, its relations to other and similar forms. Each individual was closely watch- 

 ed in his work and asked to give reasons for all the conclusions he reached. 

 Every erroneous one was corrected and every correct one confirmed, and he was 

 thus led to the discovery of important truths, and not unfrequently, though er- 

 roneously, took the credit to himself. It was Agassiz's practice to lay before his 

 students everything he was doing ; to speak freely in their presence of all his 

 scientific plans and aims; to admit them as participants in all his investigations, 

 and even to call them by the flattering appellation of fellow investigators. 



"I am convinced," says Burke, "that that method of instruction which 

 most nearly approaches methods of investigation is the true method." "It was 

 Bacon w^ho advanced and stoutly defended the view that science teaching in our 

 schools should be intuitional, living, and practical." 



Study of nature cannot commence too young. Children are born naturalists, 

 and if their childish curiosity can be encouraged and their questions satisfactorily 

 answered, they will begin life as investigators and students of nature, and their 

 interest in it and profit from it will increase through life. In nature they find 

 object-lessons of amazing attractiveness and beauty everywhere and always before 

 them. These will afford, to a thoughtful child, amusement and entertainment 

 not only more profitable but more pleasing than frivolity. In school work, so 

 far as practicable, each topic in science should be pursued three times during the 

 course of study : Firsts in the primary department, where the object should be 

 to interest the opening mind in the familiar objects of nature, and to teach the 

 habit of observation. Second, in the preparatory school, where the work of class- 

 ification and memorizing is to be performed at an age when memory is more 

 plastic and impressible than ever afterward, and when the powers of observation 

 and rapid comparison are most acute. So that — Third — in college course, the 



