i 62 
NATURE NOTES 
by selected speakers on somewhat diverse topics allowing no 
time for adequate discussion. This is a mistake common to 
most conferences. Secondly, in their endeavour to secure the 
highest official recognition, that of the Boards of Education and 
Agriculture, the promoters, or rather some of the chairmen, 
allowed too much emphasis to be given to the political aspect 
of what was several times described as a new departure in our 
National methods of education. Nature-study was represented 
as a new and happy thought eagerly adopted by the Government 
educational authorities as a means of keeping the children of our 
rural districts in those districts after they leave school, and so 
bribing the land-owning and farming classes to look more favour- 
ably upon our primary school system and the money expended 
upon it. Fortunately the Exhibition itself evinced a wider 
and truer concept of the educational import of Nature-study on 
the part of school-managers and teachers than that shown in the 
utterances to which we refer. A conservatory with an earthen 
floor was by no means an ideal place for such an exhibition ; 
and neither from the official catalogue, nor from the objects 
themselves could we disentangle any intelligible scheme of 
classification, though some was undoubtedly intended ; but 
many of the individual collections were admirable, especially 
those shown by the School Boards of our large provincial towns, 
Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester, Liverpool and Leicester, and 
those of some of the higher schools for girls, such as the Chelten- 
ham Ladies’ College and James Allen’s School at Dulwich. The 
Bootham School, York, by placing on exhibition nearly seventy 
yearly reports of their Natural History Society, demonstrated 
that Nature-study of the best sort is not truly an entire novelty 
in the school curriculum ; but with this exception and the first- 
rate contributions of St. Paul’s School, our Public Schools for 
the sons of the wealthier classes were but poorly represented. 
Most of the Training Colleges exhibiting showed a more com- 
plete recognition of our needs in this subject than would have 
been suspected, especially in the directions of blackboard drawing, 
clay modelling and brushwork ; and though in some cases notes 
had been dictated or copied from text-books instead of embody- 
ing the learners’ own observations, there were in various parts 
of the exhibition an immense number of first-rate note-books. 
We noticed with pleasure a complete absence of that rarity- 
hunting that used to be so common. Life-histories were 
frequently fully illustrated, excellently so by the Stepney 
Borough Museum; the timber of local trees formed a favourite 
object-lesson, though not one adapted to field observation ; and 
methods of seed-dispersal were also well and often represented 
in the collections. A few examples of simple experiments in 
plant-physiology, such as those exhibited by the James Allen 
School and by the South-Eastern Agricultural College, and 
some contour maps, illustrated other departments of the work ; 
but too often its geological side seemed not to have advanced 
