VUl INTRODUCTION 



if this book is used at all, it will be chiefly employed 

 by the pupil and in the way here suggested. 



3. The pupil may recite from the book, for enough of 

 formal statement and definition may have crept into the 

 work to enable it to be used as a simple text-book. 



The purpose of the book, in other words, is to sug- 

 gest methods of nature - study ; and in order to still 

 further explain what the author means by nature -study, 

 a quotation is made from his recent leaflet, issued by 

 the College of Agriculture of Cornell University, entitled 

 "What is Nature-study?": 



"It is seeing the things which one looks at, and the 

 drawing of proper conclusions from what one sees. 

 Nature -study is not the study of a science, as of botany, 

 entomology, geology, and the like. That is, it takes the 

 things at hand and endeavors to understand them, with- 

 out reference to the systematic order or relationships of 

 the objects. It is wholly informal and unsystematic, as 

 the objects are which one sees. It is entirely divorced 

 from definitions, or from explanations in books. It is 

 therefore supremely natural. It simply trains the eye 

 and the mind to see and to comprehend the common 

 things of life ; and the result is not directly the ac- 

 quirement of science, but the establishing of a living 

 sympathy with everything that is. 



"The proper objects of nature -study are the things 

 which one oftenest meets. To-day it is a stone; to- 

 morrow it is twig, a bird, an insect, a leaf, a flower. 



