Nature as an Educator. 1*73 



as the dweller in towns. I doubt this, except in cases where 

 mental or moral degradation has reduced the countryman 

 to a mere machine. I have found much genuine love of 

 nature and appreciation of natural things in the country, 

 especially in those parts in which good education has been 

 provided for the young. Even in city life this love requires 

 but to be ever so little encouraged and it will come to the 

 front with a bound. 



If we ask how this is to be done, why should we not have 

 teaching as to nature in homes and schools : little museums 

 in schools, greater and really popular ones for our cities, 

 botanical gardens open to all, zoological gardens where 

 means permit ? Why should not excursions into parks or 

 the country, or visits to museums be made a necessary part 

 of school instruction ? The answer is simply because we are 

 not sufficiently civilized to understand these things. Un- 

 fortunately also we make mistakes in our mode of 

 introducing them. The mistakes in education here as in 

 most other subjects are portentous. Mere book-learning 

 or cramming of hard names for an examination is not study 

 of nature, nor is mere laboratory work. Educators and the 

 public are apt in these matters to rush from one extreme to 

 the other. Seeing the folly of mere book tasks, it was 

 decreed that there should be practical teaching. Teachers 

 must dissect frogs and other creatures and teach their 

 pupils to do the same. The result has been failure and 

 damage to the knowledge of nature. It is one thing to see 

 an animal alive and carrying out its natural instincts; quite 

 another to cut up its dead carcase and learn hard names for 

 its parts. A boy learns ten times more of nature by watch- 

 ing the frogs swimming and diving in a pond than by 

 cutting them up ever so cleverly. I do not say that the 

 laboratory teaching is useless when managed by a skilful 

 and sympathetic teacher who can point out the meaning 

 and uses of structures and their homologies with those of 

 other animals. It has a real scientific use, but ordinarily it 

 degenerates into a mere task and cram, and has as much 

 relation to true science as the trade of a butcher has to tbat 

 of an artist. A curious illustration of this was presented 



