PREFACE 
Tuts book embodies a unified course in Nature Study and Agriculture 
for the common schools and for home reading. Teachers will find it 
a convenient manual to which they may go for information on such 
Nature lessons as they may wish to present. In the upper grades it 
should be in the hands of the pupils themselves. The various chapters 
need not be read consecutively, but the pupils should turn to such sub- 
jects as the course of study, the teacher, the season, or their interest may 
determine. 
The chapters are not all designed for use in the same grade. While 
most of the book is suited to young and old alike, such subjects as plant 
diseases, soils, and farm management are of interest only to the maturer 
pupils, and they are therefore treated somewhat more technically. 
It has long been the belief of the author that the beginning in the 
study of Agriculture should be made in Nature Study, in which is trained 
the power to see things in our physical environment as they actually 
are and to draw proper conclusions from them, and in which the learner 
acquires a good store of first-hand knowledge of plants and animals 
and other natural phenomena. In this book we make no attempt to 
draw an arbitrary dividing line between Nature Study and Agriculture. 
We shun the sentimental and essentially urban type of Nature Study 
that we have so often seen, and view Nature from the practical stand- 
point of those who live in actual contact with it. The aim has been to 
treat chiefly the topics whose study may yield knowledge of economic 
value. These may all be considered as belonging to a course in Agri- 
culture. On the other hand, of the more technical subjects generally 
included in the comprehensive texts on general Agriculture designed 
for use in high schools, we present only those more essential ones usually 
prescribed in the modern courses of study for our common schools. 
The Projects, Questions, and Experiments found at intervals through- 
out the book are provided in the belief that such studies are an indis- 
pensable feature of a course like the present one. Nature has the same 
relation to this course that the laboratory has to the study of physics 
and chemistry. By merely reading a book we cannot gain a genuine 
acquaintance with Nature any more successfully than we can learn chem- 
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