LABORATORY SUGGESTIONS 543 



20. Comstock, J. H. The Spider Book. 1912. Doubleday Page and Co., 



New York. 



21. Sanderson, E. D. Insect Pests of Farm, Orchard, and Garden. 1912. 



John Wiley and Son, N. Y. 



8. Collections. — While the educative value of a miscelianeous assortment of 

 the curios so, often brought to teachers is not great, a permanent collection of the 

 typical animals of the locality may be so arranged as to be of considerable value 

 for comparison. There should be added to these gradually, by purchase or other- 

 wise, representatives of those classes of animals not represented in the local fauna 

 in order to give the collection more of a synoptic value. Such a collection of 

 types from the more important classes of animals serves an important end in giving 

 the student a general idea of the animal kingdom as a whole, which is difficult to 

 gain in any other way. The building up of a laboratory museum with the help of 

 the students may be made to serve as an incentive to care and neatness on their 

 part in making dissections or other preparations which may bear the name of the 

 student on the labels, when permanently installed in the collection. 



It is decidedly valuable to encourage students in the special study of some 

 limited group of animals, and this may frequently be accomplished by the begin- 

 nings of a collection of the local species of the group. The permanent interest 

 and enthusiasm on the part of the pupil in the study of the phenomena of living 

 things may be taken as the measure of success in teaching the natural history 

 sciences. This can be secured more readily by studying life in its natural sur- 

 roundings than by dissections. 



