118 JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



a knowledge of those surroundings, natural and industrial, which will be 

 useful to them afterwards in rural life, it is far ahead of ours. The 

 results are better. The boys as they leave school may have less skill 

 and a smaller store of knowledge, but they are more mentally alert, have 

 greater power of adapting themselves to circumstances, are more keen to 

 use any facilities that present themselves for further education. 



I say that gardening should be conducted as an out-of-door nature- 

 study. It should be led up to in the lower standards by work which 

 trains powers of observation and habits of thought, e.g. by comparing 

 the different forms of leaves of trees and making drawings of them ; by 

 watching the sprouting of seeds and attempting to draw the seedlings 

 day by day ; by studying the conditions under which seeds germinate 

 and plants grow by means of simple experiments made by the children 

 themselves in the school room on the effect of air, warmth, light, 

 moisture, &c. ; and by tending growing plants in the school room or 

 garden. When the boys are old enough to begin systematic gardening 

 the school nature-study work should have a more direct economic bear- 

 ing : e.g. collecting the common weeds from field, allotment, and garden, 

 studying the time of seeding of the annuals and the root systems of the 

 perennials with a view to learning the reasons for their abundance and 

 the best means of eradication ; collecting garden seeds — one boy of the 

 genus Brassica and allied genera, another boy the leguminous seeds, and 

 so on — and testing samples of garden seeds for purity and germination ; 

 studying the life-history of insect pests of the garden, e.g. wireworm, 

 cockchafer, crane-fly, and winter moth ; sharing in the management of 

 bees ; keeping a calendar for recording meteorological observations and 

 garden operations ; studying the differences between the soils of the locality, 

 the depth of each soil, the nature of the subsoil, the temperature of each 

 soil, and the rate of percolation of water through each soil, and correlating 

 with these observations the character, luxuriance, and forwardness of the 

 vegetation. 



All this work must be done by the boys themselves, and the boys 

 must learn from their own observations, the part of the teacher being 

 rather to direct than to instruct. Ready- prepared collections and ready- 

 made diagrams are much better absent, not but what they may be useful, 

 but because their use is so often abused. Books should be provided and 

 their use in every way encouraged, but for reference rather than for 

 learting from. In order that the whole curriculum may gain in interest, 

 the gardening should be correlated with other school subjects. For 

 example, before the year's work begins, each boy, as a drawing exercise, 

 should make a scale drawing of his plot, with the plan of cropping. 

 As exercises in arithmetic he should measure out his distances and 

 weigh his produce, and calculate from the quantity of seed he uses — for 

 example, in two rows of peas 3^ yards long and 2 feet apart — how 

 much will be required per acre. He should keep a rough diary of 

 the operations, and afterwards wTite an account of the cultivation of each 

 crop as an exercise in composition. Lastly, he should keep an account 

 of expenses : total these up at the end of the season against the value 

 of the produce as an exercise in bookkeeping. 



About the system of cropping I have nothing to say. I am a believer 



