214 The Home Counties Nature-Study Exhibition. 
scope of nature-study. The wisdom of trying to acquaint London 
children with the life-history and use of a wheat-crop by a series of 
most unlifelike models representing a wheatfield in its various 
stages, a mill, and a loaf of bread, may certainly be doubted. But 
there can be no doubt that the work as a whole is praiseworthy and 
good. 
Sentimentality is a serious danger into which some teachers 
are clearly apt to fall. The photographs representing children in a 
school-garden, some of them working, perhaps, but one small girl 
unmistakably posing in a wheelbarrow, each photograph illustrated 
by a poetical quotation, irrelevant when it was not sentimental, were 
a particularly conspicuous instance. This kind of thing, if it has 
any effect at all, does children not good, but harm. 
A great deal of the brush-work, in which a point is made of having 
no pencil outline, is quite excellent. We may mention that from 
the Invicta Road Board School, Blackheath, done by different 
children, mostly aged thirteen, and representing sprays of Chestnut, 
Beech, Oak, Rose, Nasturtium, etc., as extraordinarily good. The 
training in observation and artistic perception involved is worthy of 
great praise. At the same time mere brush-work, however good, 
rather falls short of “nature-study” in the sense in which it is 
generally understood. 
Pen-and-ink sketches from nature of fruits and leaves, fleshy 
roots, etc.., sent by another school illustrating lessons on these 
objects were very good, but against part of this exhibit we must 
emphatically protest. This consisted of sketches by children of twelve 
or thirteen representing microscopic sections of an ovule, of a liverwort 
thallus, and of a fern-frond with sporangia. In the first place there 
are such numbers of naked-eye objects over which children of that 
age can more usefully spend their time, that it is entirely unnecessary 
and probably undesirable for them to do any microscopic work. In 
the second place the sections from which these drawings were made 
were obviously bad sections, not illustrating the structure of the 
plants in question properly. And finally, such as they were, it is 
clear that they were not understood, for they were sprinkled with 
technical terms, largely wrongly applied ; for instance a scale on 
the ventral surface of the liverwort was called a “multi-cellular 
rhizoid,” and two layers of cells on the surface of the fern frond 
were called respectively “corky cells” and “palisade layer,” while 
the structure of the ovule was completely misunderstood, not a 
single name being correctly applied. And yet to these sketches a 
