By JAMES G. NEEDHAM

Are we not agreed as to the fundamentals of a nature-study program? Professor Trafton raises this question in the October number of THE NATURE-STUDY REVIEW, and I want to go on record as believing that we are agreed quite as far as we should be. The essentials of our agreement may be grouped under these three heads:

I. The nature-study course should be general-as general as the child's principal interests in the things and in the processes of

nature.

II. It should be organized from the child's standpoint, proceeding from what he knows to what he can find out, and following the natural order of his developing aptitudes, putting wholes before parts, large things before small ones, attractive things before the less attractive.

III. It should fit the environment and be adapted to season, locality and conditions.

What certain critics have mistaken for disagreement among nature-study teachers is merely lack of uniformity, and is generally wholesome and desirable. Among the causes of this lack of uniformity are the following:

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I. The infinity of nature. Her offerings are innumerable. one can know or use them all, and with so much from which to choose not all teachers will choose the same things, though all may use what they choose to meet the same good ends.

II. The difference of locality, in accordance with which nature's offerings differ. Good nature-study teachers use things that are common and near at hand. They should not be expected to use the same things in the same manner all the way from Maine to California, any more than fishermen should be expected to do their fishing by the same methods.

III. Personal knowledge of nature possessed by the teacher. Each teacher should use what she can use best; what she knows best, likes best, and succeeds with best.

IV. Shifts of emphasis that grow out of increase to scientific knowledge. Such work with mosquitoes, with flies, or with bacteria as is often stressed now-a-days would not have been tolerated a generation ago, before the sanitary importance of these pests was known.

V. Control by the educational over-lords. Superintendents as a rule are sadly lacking in knowledge of nature, yet they have not hesitated to set metes and bounds to the nature-study work done in their schools, even by thoroughly competent teachers. Administration tends to uniformity-and to mediocrity.

It is neither surprising nor regrettable, therefore, that naturestudy teachers are not all using the same things in the same way the country over. It is sufficient that they are working toward a common end, and that end, the education of the children in the love of nature and in acquaintance with and ability to use their own environment. When used to these ends real nature-study is never found wanting.

There are fashion-mongers in pedagogy as elsewhere; and they like to set us to cutting the cloth just a little different each season, and they like to get us to using new names for things. Thus they make quite a show of doing something original. Just now they are juggling with the "Junior High Schools" and with "general science." The content of general science courses, in so far as it has any value in primary education, is purely and solely nature-study renamed. And it must be so; for the primary educational need of human kind will ever be knowledge of mother nature, the source and sustenance of all human affairs-the great primal educator, who sets all our fundamental tasks for us, and offers all our permanent rewards. And at all stages of our progress, whatever we name our tasks, we shall only get on by the first hand study of nature, using the two old methods that have wrought achievement in the past-observation and experiment.

The report of the New York Meeting of the American
Nature-Study Society will appear in the February issue.

The Index for Volume 12 of the REVIEW will also be
mailed with the February issue.

By FLORENCE J. KANE

Nature-study may be made one of the most profitable subjects taught in the common schools. However, teachers should not labor under an erroneous idea of what nature-study is. Reading about the duckbill-platypus of Australia or the ant-eater of South America or listening to the teacher's tale of the life story of the octopus or the crocodile may be highly entertaining natural history for a boy and may give him considerable erudition, but it can hardly be called nature-study. First of all, nature-study should be practical and suited to the environment in which the child lives. Hence a lesson on the common house fly, the clothes moth, or the cockroach not from reading but from direct observation of the insects' life habits-may be made practical nature-study for the child, and if the lessons are conducted in a psychological way, may give him no little mental training. Nor need a teacher fear that the material for study that lies within the surroundings of the child's own home will ever be exhausted, however humble and limited in area that abode may be; for the living things of earth are like the stars of the heavens in this: that the more intensified study reveals but a greater infinitude. As Longfellow said of Nature and Agassiz:

"And whenever the way seemed long,
Or his heart began to fail,

She would sing a more wonderful song,
Or tell a more marvelous tale."

I like the idea of gardening and tree planting for the child because from these useful activities may be derived innumerable lessons in seed testing, seed sprouting, seed planting, soil cultivation and drainage, plant cultivation, and the conservation of that animal life which is beneficial to man's existence.

When it is almost time for a child to buy his seeds in the spring, he will enjoy a lesson on seed testing. When he has buried his seeds in the soil, seed germination under a bell jar will be highly instructive and entertaining. He will be pleased with a lesson on the earthworm and the ant when he knows they are directly concerned in the fertilization, cultivation and drainage of his soil. He will regard the bee as his assistant in fruit production. The hideous, despised toad, the reptile-like salamander, the frog, the loathed garter snake-animals he has been reared to look upon