900 Science- Teaching in the Schools. 
an additional task; and that the improvement of morale will actu- 
ally enable the schools to accomplish more in other studies. 
It remains, then, to outline briefly the work which may be profit- 
ably attempted. In the primary schools, and the lower grades o 
the intermediate, or grammar, schools, the main objects must be to 
keep alive the child’s curiosity in regard to natural objects, to 
cultivate the power of accurate observation, and to impress the 
mind with the idea that nature is worth studying. The attempt 
to teach any systematic body of facts and doctrines, so far as it 
is made at all, must be strictly subordinated to these more gen- 
eral objects. Hence it is no matter how desultory the lessons may 
be, if they tend to keep the mind of the child in loving commu- 
nion with nature. The pupils should be encouraged to collect 
and bring to school specimens of all sorts of natural objects. So 
far as time allows, each specimen should be the subject of a les- 
son. Judicious questioning should bring out all the facts and phe- 
nomena which the child has observed or can observe in regard to the 
specimen. Then the teacher should add something of explanation 
or information in regard to the object itself or other related objects. 
And let questions be suggested now and then, which the child and 
his elders are alike unable to answer. Thus the child will become: 
early habituated to the complementary truths of the transparency 
and the unfathomableness of nature. He will learn that he can 
see into nature a little way for himself, but that beyond his vision 
stretches a vast unknown. The specimens brought in will be an 
utterly heterogeneous collection—now a bright-winged butterfly, 
now a flower, now a plant with insect galls, now a sea-shell brought 
home from some summer visit to the sea-side, now a lustrous erys- 
tal, now a smoothly rounded pebble. All the better. Jet the 
children learn the manifoldness of nature. It will be time enough 
later for them to survey the fences of systematic definition which 
man has run through nature’s continuous and illimitable fields. 
Short excursions in the woods and fields (or in the parks which 
afford almost the only glimpses of nature to the unfortunate chil- 
dren who are brought up in the great cities), and visits to muse- 
ums, zoological gardens, and menageries, will be helpful supple- 
ments to the work of the school-room. 
Besides the utterly desultory lessons already considered, a begin- 
ning may be made in the primary schools in somewhat more sys- 
