impaled on a pin that we might suffer at being thrust through by a stake. The insect nervous system is far more conveniently arranged for such an ordeal than ours; and, too, the cyanide bottle brings immediate and painless death to the insects placed within it; moreover, the insects usually collected have short lives anyway. So far as the child is concerned, he is thinking of his collection of moths or butterflies and not at all of taking life; so it is not teaching him to wantonly destroy living creatures. However, an indiscriminate encouragement of the making of insect collections cannot be advised. There are some children who will profit by it and some who will not, and unquestionably the best kind of study of insects is watching their interesting ways while they live.

To kill a creature in order to prepare it for a nature-study lesson is not only wrong but absurd, for nature-study has to do with life rather than death, and the form of any creature is interesting only when its adaptations for life are studied. But again, a nature-study teacher may be an opportunist; if without any volition on her part or the pupils', a freshly killed specimen comes to hand, she should make the most of it. The writer remembers most illuminating lessons from a partridge that broke a window and its neck simultaneously during its flight one winter night, a yellow hammer that killed itself against an electric wire, and a muskrat that turned its toes to the skies for no understandable reason. In each of these cases the creature's special physical adaptations for living its own peculiar life were studied, and the effect was not the study of a dead thing, but of a successful and wonderful life.

THE LENS, MICROSCOPE and field GLASS AS HELPS IN NATURE-STUDY N elementary grades, nature-study deals with objects which the children can see with the naked eye. However, a lens is a help in almost all of this work because it is such a joy to the child to gaze at the wonders it reveals. There is no lesson given in this book which requires more than a simple lens for seeing the most minute parts discussed. An An excellent lens may be bought for a dollar, and a fairly good one for fifty cents or even twenty-five cents. The lens should be chained to a table or desk where it may be used by the pupils at recess. This gives each an opportunity for using it and obviates the danger of losing it. If the pupils themselves own lenses, they should be fastened by a string or chain to the pocket.

A microscope has no legitimate part in nature-study. But if there is one available, it reveals so many wonders in the commonest objects, that it can be made a source of added interest ofttimes. For instance, to thus see the scales on the butterfly's wing affords the child pleasure as well as edification. Field or opera glasses, while indispensible for bird study, are by no means necessary in nature-study. However, the pupils will show greater interest in noting the birds' colors if they are allowed to make the observations with the help of a glass.

USES OF PICTURES, CHARTS AND BLACKBOARD DRAWINGS

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ICTURES alone should never be used as the subjects for nature-study lessons, but they may be of great use in illustrating and illuminating a lesson. Books well illustrated are more readily comprehended by the child and are often very helpful to him, especially after his interest in the subject is thoroughly aroused. If charts are used to illustrate the lesson, the child is likely to be misled by the size of the drawing, which is also the case in blackboard pictures. However, this error may be avoided by fixing the attention of the pupil on the object first. If the pupils are studying the ladybird and have it in their hands, the teacher may use a diagram representing the beetle as a foot long and it will still convey the idea accurately; but if she begins with the picture, she probably can never convince the children that the picture has anything to do with the insect.

In making blackboard drawings illustrative of the lesson, it is best, if possible, to have one of the pupils do the drawing in the presence of the class; or, if the teacher does the drawing, she should hold the object in her hand while doing it and look at it often so that the children may see that she is trying to represent it accurately. Taking everything into consideration, however, nature-study charts and blackboard drawings are of little use to the nature-study teacher.

THE USES OF SCIENTIFIC NAMES

ISQUIETING problems relative to scientific nomenclature always confront the teacher of nature-study. My own practice has been to use the popular names of species, except in cases where confusion might ensue, and to use the scientific names for anatomical parts. However, this matter is of little importance if the teacher bears in mind that the purpose of nature-study is to know the subject under observation and to learn the name incidentally.

If the teacher says: "I have a pink hepatica. Can anyone find me a blue one?" the children, who naturally like grown-up words, will soon be calling these flowers hepaticas. But if the teacher says, "These flowers are called hepaticas. Now please everyone remember the name. Write it in your books as I write it on the blackboard, and in half an hour I shall ask you again what it is," the pupils naturally look upon the exercise as a word lesson and its real significance is lost. This sort of nature-study is. dust and ashes and there has been too much of it. The child should never be required to learn the name of anything in the nature-study work; but the name should be used so often and so naturally in his presence, that he will learn it without being conscious of the process.

THE STORY AS A SUPPLEMENT TO THE NATURE-STUDY LESSON

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ANY of the subjects for nature lessons can be studied only in part, since but one phase may be available at the time. Often, especially if there is little probability that the pupils will find opportunity to complete the study, it is best to round out their knowledge by reading or telling the story to supplement the facts which they have discov

ered for themselves. This story should not be told as a finality or as a complete picture but as a guide and inspiration for further study. Always leave at the end of the story an interrogation mark that will remain aggressive and insistent in the child's mind. To illustrate: Once a club of junior naturalists brought me rose leaves injured by the leaf-cutter bee and asked me why the leaves were cut out so regularly. I told them the story of the use made by the mother bee of these oval and circular bits of leaves and made the account as vital as I was able; but at the end I said, "I do not know which species of bee cut these leaves. She is living here among us and building her nest with your rose leaves which she is cutting every day almost under your very eyes. Is she then so much more clever than you that you cannot see her nor find her nest?" For two years following this lesson I received letters from members of this club. Two carpenter bees and their nests were discovered by them and studied before the mysterious leaf-cutter was finally ferreted out. My story had left something interesting for the young naturalists to discover. The children should be impressed with the fact that the nature story is never finished. There is not a weed nor an insect nor a tree so common that the child, by observing carefully, may not see things never yet recorded in scientific books; therefore the supplementary story should be made an inspiration for keener interest and further investigation on the part of the pupil. The supplementary story simply thrusts aside some of the obscuring underbrush thus revealing more plainly the path to further knowledge.

THE NATURE-STUDY ATTITUDE TOWARD LIFE AND DEATH

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ERHAPS no greater danger besets the pathway of the nature-study teacher than the question involved in her pupils' attitude toward life and death. To inculcate in the child a reverence for life and yet to keep him from becoming mawkish and morbid is truly a problem. It is almost inevitable that the child should become sympathetic with the life of the animal or plant studied, since a true understanding of the life of any creature creates an interest which stimulates a desire to protect this particular creature and make its life less hard. Many times, within my own experience, have I known boys, who began by robbing birds' nests for egg collections, to end by becoming most zealous protectors of the birds. The humane qualities within these boys budded and blossomed in the growing knowledge of the lives of the birds. At Cornell University, it is a well known fact that those students who turn aside so as not to crush the ant, caterpillar or cricket on the pavement are almost invariably those that are studying entomology; and in America it is the botanists themselves who are leading the crusade for flower protection.

Thus, the nature-study teacher, if she does her work well, is a sure aid in inculcating a respect for the rights of all living beings to their own lives; and she needs only to lend her influence gently in this direction to change. carelessness to thoughtfulness and cruelty to kindness. But with this impetus toward a reverence for life, the teacher soon finds herself in a dilemma from which there is no logical way out, so long as she lives in a world where lamb chop, beefsteak and roast chicken are articles of ordi

nary diet; a world in fact, where every meal is based upon the death of some creature. For if she places much emphasis upon the sacredness of life, the children soon begin to question whether it be right to slay the lamb or the chicken for their own food. It would seem that there is nothing for the consistent nature-study teacher to do but become a vegetarian, and even then there might arise refinements in this question of taking life, she might have to consider the cruelty to asparagus in cutting it off in plump infancy, or the ethics of devouring in the turnip the food laid up by the mother plant to perfect her seed. In fact, a most rigorous diet would be forced upon the teacher who should refuse to sustain her own existence at the cost of life; and if she should attempt to teach the righteousness of such a diet she would undoubtedly forfeit her position; and yet what is she to do! She will soon find herself in the position of a certain lady who placed sheets of sticky fly-paper around her kitchen to rid her house of flies, and then in mental anguish picked off the buzzing, struggling victims and sought to clean their too adhesive wings and legs.

In fact, drawing the line between what to kill and what to let live, requires the use of common sense rather than logic. First of all, the nature-study teacher, while exemplifying and encouraging the humane. attitude toward the lower creatures, and repressing cruelty which wantonly causes suffering, should never magnify the terrors of death. Death is as natural as life and the inevitable end of physical life on our globe. Therefore, every story and every sentiment expressed which makes the child feel that death is terrible, is wholly wrong. The one right way to teach about death is not to emphasize it one way or another, but to deal with it as a circumstance common to all; it should be no more emphasized than the fact that creatures eat or fall asleep.

Another thing for the nature-study teacher to do is to direct the interest of the child so that it shall center upon the hungry creature rather than upon the one which is made into the meal. It is well to emphasize the fact that one of the conditions imposed upon every living being in the woods and fields, is that it is entitled to a meal when it is hungry, if it is clever enough to get it. The child naturally takes this view of it. I remember well as a child I never thought particularly about the mouse which my cat was eating; in fact, the process of transmuting mouse into cat seemed altogether proper, but when the cat played with the mouse, that was quite another thing, and was never permitted. Although no one appreciates more deeply than I the debt which we owe to Thompson-Seton and writers of his kind, who have placed before the public the animal story from the animal point of view and thus set us all to thinking, yet it is certainly wrong to impress this view too strongly upon the young and sensitive child. In fact, this process should not begin until the judgment and the understanding is well developed, for we all know that although seeing the other fellow's standpoint is a source of strength and breadth of mind, yet living the other fellow's life is, at best, an enfeebling process and a futile waste of energy.

SHOULD THE NATURE-STUDY TEACHER TEACH HOW TO DESTROY LIFE? T IS probably within the proper scope of the nature-study teacher to place emphasis upon the domain of man, who being the most powerful of all animals, asserts his will as to which ones shall live in his midst. From a standpoint of abstract justice, the stray cat has just as much right to kill and eat the robin which builds in the vine of my porch as the robin has to pull and eat the earthworms from my lawn; but the place is mine, and I choose to kill

the cat and preserve the robin.

When emphasizing the domain of man, we may have to deal with the killing of creatures which are injurious to his interests. Nature-study may be tributary to this, in a measure, and indirectly, but it is surely not nature-study. For example, the child studies the cabbage butterfly in all its stages, the exquisitely sculptured yellow egg, the velvety green caterpillar, the chrysalis with its protecting colors, the white-winged butterfly, and becomes interested in the life of the insect. Not under any consideration, when the attention of the child is focused on the insect, should we suggest a remedy for it when a pest. Let the life-story of the butterfly stand as a fascinating page of nature's book. But later, when the child enters on his career as a gardener, when he sets out his row of cabbage plants and waters and cultivates them, and does his best to bring them to maturity, along comes the butterfly, now an arch enemy, and begins to rear her progeny on the product of his toil. Now the child's interest is focused on the cabbage, and the question is not one of killing insects so much as of saving plants. In fact, there is nothing in spraying the plants with Paris green which suggests cruelty to innocent caterpillars, nor is the process likely to harden the child's sensibilities.

To gain knowledge of the life-story of insects or other creatures is nature-study. To destroy them as pests is a part of Agriculture or Horticulture. The one may be of fundamental assistance to the other, but the two are quite separate and should never be confused.

THE FIELD NOTE-BOOK

A field note-book may be made a joy to the pupil and a help to the teacher. Any kind of a blank book will do for this, except that it should not be too large to be carried in the pocket, and it should always have the pencil attached. To make the note-book a success the following rules should be observed:

(a) The book should be considered the personal property of the child and should never be criticized by the teacher except as a matter of encouragement; for the spirit in which the notes are made, is more important than the information they cover.

(b) The making of drawings should be encouraged for illustrating what is observed. A graphic drawing is far better than a long description of a natural object.

(c) The note-book should not be regarded as a part of the work in English. The spelling, language and writing of the notes should all be exempt from criticism.

(d) As occasion offers, outlines for observing certain plants or animals may be placed in the note-book previous to the field excursion so as to give definite points for the work.