The term Nature-Study is one that still lacks a 
definition that will find unanimous approval. Even the 
writers of books on the subject are by no means agreed 
as to what it means. Prof. L. H. Bailey sa^^s "it is not 
the study of science," and with this dictum John Bur- 
roughs agrees, but others of equal authority insist that 
elementary science and nature-study are synonymous. 
No matter which side of the argument we take, this 
much is certain; both nature-study and elementary 
science deal wnth the world about us, and if there is any 
difference between the two, it would seem to lie in the 
spirit with which we approach the subject. In the study 
of elementary science, the student young or old is con- 
cerned with the discovery of connected facts about the 
object studied ; in nature-study, if we have properly 
understood the term, the desire is not so much to find 
out all that is possible about a given subject as to find 
out what is pleasing about it. The advocate of nature- 
study would do away with all dissection and analysis 
and turn attention to the beautiful, the curious and the 
interesting. In the hands of an intelligent teacher, herself 
an ardent naturalist, it is conceivable that good results 
may come from this view of the subject; but as the 
matter is at present, when any teacher with sufficient 
intelligence to teach in the lower grades of the school, 
is assumed to be fully competent to teach ''nature-study" 
the teaching too often runs into sentimental nonsense 
that is worse for the child than no nature study at all. 
Real nature-study can rarely be taught to advantage 
in the school-room, for there the conditions are unnatural. 
If taught at all the child's know^ledge is likely to be more 
or less out of proportion because some parts of nature 
are more easily studied indoors than others. For these 
reasons it appears to us that if anything about nature 
is to be taught in school, it should be elementary science 
