142 



Report on Zoology. 



for the young, the curriculum of studies in most of our 

 schools and academies to-day is almost a precise copy of 

 that of many years ago. In nearly all the practical busi- 

 ness of life the latest discoveries and conclusions of science 

 are eagerly sought for, but our school commissioners seem 

 oblivious to the fact that nature has any claim upon the 

 attention of the student. 



It is to be regretted that in the schools of Albany so 

 little attention is paid to natural history. With the one or 

 two exceptions, where some attempts are made to teach the 

 simplest rudiments of a knowledge of living forms, natu- 

 ral history is not taught in our schools. Pupils who are 

 to go into the active business of life as merchants, mecha- 

 nics or agriculturists are compelled to spend very large 

 portions of their school days in attempts to acquire the 

 rudiments of languages, no words of which they are 

 expected ever to speak or hear, and thus months and years 

 are spent in learning words independent of facts, while the 

 external world, teeming with its forms and phenomena, is 

 but a sealed volume to the student. "I think," says a 

 learned English official, " that it is more important for a 

 man to know where his liver is situated and what its func- 

 tions are, than to know it is jecur in Latin, and fyjrap in 

 Greek." 



That natural history can and ought to be taught in our 

 schools, there can be no doubt; the trouble seems to be 

 first to teach school boards that Latin and Greek are no 

 better and indeed by [no means so well calculated to 

 develop the mind of the young as a knowledge of natural 

 objects ; and, second, there are so few professional teachers 

 who have given the necessary study to the subject of living 

 forms. When school commissioners insist that there shall 

 be less of books and more of nature taught, teachers will 

 qualify themselves for the work required of them. 



