Science-Teaching in the Schools. 773 
worse than making bricks without straw, to teach natural science to 
college juniors and seniors, in whom disuse has wrought so complete 
an atrophy of the powers of observation that they hardly know that 
there is an external universe. 
Manifestly, the only right course in education is to furnish intelli- 
gent and sympathetic guidance to the child’s natural curiosity. The 
study of nature should be introduced at the beginning of the educa- 
tional course, instead of near its end. It should commence—not in 
the primary school, but in the nursery, before the child is old enough 
to go to school at all. A vast deal of knowledge may be smuggled 
into the child’s mind without paying any duty of conscious toil. 
And such smuggling is forbidden by no laws of God or man. No 
child is hurt by knowing too much; though many a child is hurt 
by learning things in unnatural and unduly laborious ways. What- 
ever of useful knowledge a child gets while he thinks he is playing 
is clear gain. The sentiment, 
“ No profit grows where is no pleasure ta’en,’’ 
may not be strictly true, but there is at least an important truth 
in it. 
Some years ago I had the pleasure of a somewhat intimate 
acquaintance with a boy who, in his third summer, became very 
much interested in flowers, or, as he called them, “sowers,” for at 
that time his language, besides being very scanty in vocabulary, 
presented some marked dialectic peculiarities. Having obtained 
Some specimens of the tawny day-lily (Hemorocallis fulva), he 
noticed the long slender bodies in the middle of the flower, and he 
asked his mother what they were. It seemed almost absurd to be 
teaching botany to a baby hardly more than two years old, but his 
mother, having large faith in the general principle that the best 
way to answer a child’s questions is to tell the truth, told him that 
the things he had found were the stamens and pistil. Of course 
the baby did not know much about the objects which he examined. 
It was not time for his brain to be disturbed with matters of mor- 
Phology and physiology. It was not time for him to learn that 
stamens and pistils are peculiarly modified leaves, or that they are 
respectively the male and female organs of reproduction. But his 
eyes were often busy that summer in looking for the stamens and 
Pistils in various flowers, and in that simple matter of observation 
