Erom Agricultural Gazette of N. S. Wales. 
January i 1904. 
Miscellaneous Publication, No. 700. 
Tlje Willie Wagtail. 
Nature Study. 
WALTER W. FROGGATT, 
Government Entomologist. 
In this bright sunny climate, Nature has clothed our hills and fields 
with a profusion of plants and fiowers with their attendant birds and 
insects, but it is perhaps this very abundance of plant and animal life 
that is responsible for 
a careless disregard of 
the study of our sur¬ 
roundings. They are too 
common; yet, as Pro¬ 
fessor Huxley said, 
‘‘ Science is only com¬ 
mon sense applied to 
common things,’^ and 
every child living in the 
bush could be a bush 
naturalist ; he has not 
the advantages of the 
city child in many things, 
but, with a little direc¬ 
tion, he could be taught 
to think, and find pictures 
in the fields and sky, 
and a museum in Nature’s 
workshop round his feet, 
and thus fill up many 
happy hours quite as pro¬ 
fitably as the city child. 
Birds cannot be studied and 
their secrets and habits dis¬ 
covered without living among 
them. Who can tell what 
wonderful thoughts are pass¬ 
ing through the little brain of 
the hen robin perched on the post, or her 
' vagabond city cousin, the sparrow, stealing 
the canary’s seed ? 
In the days when the great western plains and scrubs 
were parcelled out into sheep runs, and fences were 
an unknown thing, the dividing bounda,ry between 
the stations was a vague and elastic line. Then 
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