MICHIGAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCE. 
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schools where the interest is about as dead as the specimens they study, 
the reason is, I believe, very apparent. 
On the other hand, we all know that an interest in the live — or Natural 
History — side of animal and plant life does go with many of our best students 
after their secondary school days are over; and the number of lay naturalists 
among the ranks of business and professional men, most fortunately, seems 
to be annually increasing. The number of such lay naturalists in England is 
remarkably large, and some excellent contributions to science are made 
through them. It is highly desirable that the same condition may in time 
obtain in our own country; and one of the best ways to hasten this time is 
to bring our biology students in closer touch with the Natural History of 
their environments, and to give them practiced training in lines that can be 
made use of in later life rather than spending so much of the time on things 
that we know they will never use or care to use, or that would be of little 
value if they were used. 
But fortunately the study of life relations, life functions, habits, life his- 
tories, and even the broader economic side is coming to occupy a larger and 
larger place in the biological courses in our more progressive high schools. In 
Botany, some of our greatest American leaders are urging that more time 
be spent in high school botany on the ecological, or broader Natural History 
side, and less on the dissection and morphological side. And should not 
this be equally true of high school — not college — zoology? More time, in 
truth, on the live side and less on the dead side of these subjects. 
There is not much doubt that the dissection work, and the continued 
work with compound microscope, once planned and set in motion, is much 
easier to carry on from the teacher’s standpoint ; and there is even less doubt 
that such work is of far less interest — certainly of far less value — from the 
student’s standpoint. 
It is a hard confession to make, yet one that I honestly believe to be true, 
that one reason why some teachers of Botany and Zoology do not dwell more 
on the live, out-of-door side of their subjects is partly because the well beaten 
path of the indoor laboratory has come to offer to them a "line of least resist- 
ance,” and partly because they fear to face many of the problems of the field — 
t he latter in large part because they themselves have spent so little time in 
the field, and hence know so little of the flora and the fauna of their regions. 
If we accept as a part of our biological creed that it is our duty to “interest 
the pupils more deeply and intelligently in the biota of their regions,” how 
can we hope to accomplish this unless we ourselves spend much time in the field 
and have a good working knowledge of our regions? But how many biology 
teachers really do spend much time in the field or have a very comprehensive 
knowledge of the Natural History of their regions? How then can we expect 
to get the best results in teaching Natural History until teachers come to 
study their own regions, and get much of their teaching knowledge from 
Nature rather than from books. 
A mere working acquaintance of our floras and faunas is by no means 
everything, but is by all means something — and something decidedly worth 
while for any teacher who expects to do any kind of field work. How much 
a teacher lowers himself in the estimation of his students if he is unable to 
recognize some of the most common forms in the field — possibly some forms 
that even a part of the class may know. Nor is this ignorance of forms in 
the field confined to secondary school teachers; you know college instructors 
and professors where this is true, and so do I. 
With all the excellent field helps of recent years there is even less excuse 
