AN OUT-DOOR EQUIPMENT EOR COLLEGE 

 WORK IN BIOLOGY. 



JAMES G. NEEDHAM. . 



The study of living nature is chiefly manifest at the two 

 •extremes of our educational system in the establishment of 

 public school gardens and university summer laboratories. Of 

 what is being done in this line between the grades and the 

 graduates less is heard. Perhaps it is because the high school 

 and the college are less prone to advertise themselves by novel- 

 ties in their educational programs: perhaps, because they are 

 seeking to develop new methods instead of creating them full 

 fashioned outright. 



Thus far, the grades that have acquired good school gardens 

 seem to have the better of it. Eor, besides having established 

 an inexhaustible and ever accessible base of supplies for nature 

 study work, they have at the same time set the pupils enthusi- 

 astically to educating themselves, and by the historic method — 

 by doing over again in the garden such work as was done when 

 the mental fibre of the race was first toughening. 



The situation in high schools seems less fortunate. While 

 many of them have books outlining ecological phenomena, very 

 few of them have proper opportunity for the study of such 

 phenomena. The grounds of the average high school are the 

 most drear and barren waste within the city limits. The life 

 that belongs to the soil has been exterminated. Only trees are 



