The function of the public park is partly to furnish convenient places for wholesome sport and recreation for the young, partly to supply attractive resting-places for their elders, and above all to inculcate in all ages and classes that fondness for nature and the country which, when once acquired, becomes a never-failing source of health, contentment, and happiness. An hour or so a day, a half day or a whole day once a week, spent in the beautiful and secluded scenes of a well-planned park not only brings rest and a sense of contentment to the overworked toilers in the city, but should result in stimulating or creating that love of nature which, when the opportunity exists to satisfy it, is the surest means of securing health and happiness. There is in every human breast an inborn love of nature, which needs only to be quickened into consciousness to exert a benign and happy influence throughout a man's whole life. The city boy who has spent a summer in the woods spends the rest of his life in trying to get back there. The demoralizing atmosphere of the modern city can suppress, but not wholly eradicate, this longing for the beautiful in nature; it can be revived; and the means of gratifying it and of utilizing it for the amelioration of conditions and the advancement of the race are to be found in the establishment of public parks.

It is here that we see the connection between parks and education; for unfortunately it is the fact that those who live in cities, particularly those who are born there, must be made familiar by personal experience and contact with the enjoyment to be obtained from nature before they realize the opportunities for rational pleasure to be found in the parks; and they should be encouraged to acquire that fondness for country scenes and open-air recreation which, when once acquired, is never forgotten, and which will furnish the means of wholesome and inexpensive enjoyment throughout the rest of their lives.

Speaking more especially of this particular community, it is evident that the people must be educated to appreciate the beauties of our parks and the use that can be made of them. At the present time not over a small fraction of the people seem to understand what our parks consist of or what they were acquired for. The facilities for boating, skating, bathing, gymnastic work, and the playing of games are known and appreciated, although not so much as they might be; the drives are fairly well patronized in spring and autumn; the beaches are crowded on hot summer days; and on Sundays and holidays in pleasant weather a certain number of picnic parties may be found here and there scattered throughout the parks. A few stray lovers of nature may also occasionally be found in the woods and wilder reservations. Generally speaking, however, it may be said that the woods, meadows, hills, and rivers which comprise nine-tenths of our parks and which constitute in extent, beauty, and accessibility a park system which has no rival in the world, are unknown to the public except by name, and are not fulfilling the purpose for which they were established.

It is clear that information, instruction, education are necessary in order that the people may understand and profit by the endless opportunities for recreation and improvement which our parks afford. It seems evident also that the best place for this education to begin is in the schools. Some steps in this direction have already been taken in the school gardens which have been established in this and other cities, and in the greater attention devoted to horticulture, to botany, and to what has been termed "nature study." The things which cannot be taught by books, the ordinary things of life, are equally important with the learning of the schoolroom, and can be learned only out of doors. Our parks afford an endless field for instruction of this sort, which, as well as information in gardening, arboriculture, and forestry, might be given, it would seem, by means of regular inspection trips conducted by persons competent to teach the children to look about them and to take an interest in what they see. The parks themselves should be a school, not only for education in the arts connected with plant life, but in the appreciation of the beauties of nature and in that greatest of all arts, the art of enjoying life.

American political methods have furnished American educators with unequaled opportunities for inculcating in the young that love for the beauties of nature which, when acquired, will greatly enlarge their capacity for wholesome enjoyment, and thus ameliorate the conditions of modern city life. Our city governments would seem to have done their duty in the premises; public parks have been furnished by our democratic. communities upon a scale of liberality unknown elsewhere in the world. It remains for those specially interested in the cause of education to devise the means by which these splendid facilities for improving the health, morals, and happiness of the people may be utilized as intended by those who are responsible for their establishment.

THE NATURE-STUDY MOVEMENT

L. H. BAILEY, DIRECTOR OF COLLEGE OF AGRICULTURE, CORNELL UNIVERSITY, ITHACA, N. Y.

The nature-study movement is the outgrowth of an effort to put the child into contact and sympathy with its own life.

It is strange that such a movement is necessary. It would seem to be the natural, and almost the inevitable, thing that the education of the child. should be such as to place it in intimate relation with the objects and events with which it lives. It is a fact, however, that our teaching has been largely exotic to the child; that it has begun by taking the child away from its natural environment; that it has concerned itself with the subject-matter rather than with the child. This is the marvel of marvels in education.

Let me illustrate by a reference to the country school. If any man were to find himself in a country wholly devoid of schools, and were to be set the task of originating and organizing a school system, he would almost unconsciously introduce some subjects that would be related to the habits. of the people and to the welfare of the community. Being freed from traditions, he would teach something of the plants and animals and fields. and people. Yet, as a matter of fact, what do our rural schools teach? They usually teach the things that the academies and the colleges and the universities have taught that old line of subjects that is supposed, in its higher phases, to lead to "learning." The teaching in the elementary school is a reflection of old academic methods. We really begin our system at the wrong end-with a popularizing and simplifying of methods and subjects that are the product of the so-called higher education. We should begin with the child. "The greatest achievement of modern education," writes Professor Payne, "is the gradation and correlation of schools, whereby the ladder of learning is let down from the university to secondary schools, and from these to the schools of the people." It is historically true that the common schools are the products of the higher or special schools, and this explains why it is that so much of the commonschool work is unadapted to the child. The kindergarten, and some of the manual-training, are successful revolts against all this. It seems a pity that it were ever necessary that the ladder of learning be "let down;" it should be stood on the ground.

The crux of the whole subject lies in the conception of what education is. We all define it in theory to be a drawing out and developing of the powers of the mind; but in practice we define it in the terms of the means. that we employ. We have come to associate education with certain definite subjects, as if no other sets of subjects could be made the means of educating a mind. One by one new subjects have forced themselves in as being proper means for educating. All the professions, natural science, mechanic arts, politics, and last of all agriculture, have contended for a place in educational systems and have established themselves under protest. Now, any subject, when put into pedagogic form, is capable of being the means. of educating a man. The study of Greek is no more a proper means of education than the study of Indian corn is. The mind may be developed by means of either one. Classics and calculus are no more divine than machines and potatoes are. We are much in the habit of speaking of certain subjects as leading to "culture;" but this is really all factitious, for "culture" is the product only of efficient teaching, whatever the subjectmatter may be. So insistent have we been on the employing of "culture studies" that we seem to have taken the means of education for the object or result of education. What a man is, is more important than what he knows. Anything that appeals to a man's mind is capable of drawing out and training a man's mind; and is there any subject that does not appeal,

to some man's mind? The subject may be Sanskrit literature, hydraulics, physics, electricity, or agriculture-all may be made the means whereby men and women are educated, all may lead to what we ought to know as culture. The particular subject with which the person deals is incidental, for "A man's a man for a' that and a' that."

Is there, then, to be no choice of subjects? There certainly is. It is the end of education to prepare the man or woman better to live. The person must live with his surroundings. He must live with common things. The most important means with which to begin the educational process, therefore, are those subjects that are nearest the man. Educating by means of these subjects puts the child into first-hand relation with his own life. It expands the child's spontaneous interest in his environment into a permanent and abiding sympathy and philosophy of life. I never knew an exclusive student of classics or philosophy who did not deplore his lack of touch with his own world. These common subjects are the natural, primary, fundamental, necessary subjects. Only as the child-mind develops should it be taken on long flights to extrinsic subjects, distant lands, to things far beyond its own realm; and yet, does not our geography teaching often still begin with the universe or with the solar system?

In the good time coming, geography will not begin with a book at all, as, in fact, it does not now with many teachers. It may end with one. It will begin with physical features in the very neighborhood in which the child lives with brooks and lakes and hills and fields. Education always should begin with objects and phenomena. We are living in a text-book and museum age. First of all, we put our children into books, sometimes even into books that tell about the very things at the child's door, as if a book about a thing were better than the thing itself. So accustomed are we to the book-route that we regard any other route as unsystematic, unmethodical, disconnected. Books are only secondary means of education. We have made the mistake of making them primary. This mistake we are rapidly correcting. As the book is relegated to its proper sphere, we shall find ourselves free to begin with the familiar end of familiar things. Not only are we to begin with common objects and events, but with the child's natural point of contact with them. Start with the child's sympathies; lead him on and out. We are to develop the child, not the subject. The specialists may be trusted to develop the subject-matter and to give us new truth. The child is first interested in the whole plant, the whole bug, the whole bird, as a living, growing object. It is a most significant fact that most young children like plants, but that most youths dislike botany. The fault lies neither in the plants nor in the youths. A youth may study cells until he hates the plant that bears the cells. He may acquire a technical training in cells, but he may be divorced from objects with which he must live, and his life becomes poorer rather than richer. I have no objection to minute dissection and analysis, but we

must be very careful not to begin it too early nor to push it too far, for we are not training specialists, but are developing the power that will enable the pupil to get the most from his own life. As soon as the pupil begins to lose interest in the plant or the animal itself, stop!

There is still another reason for the study of the common things in variety it develops the power to grasp the problems of the day and to make the man resourceful. A young man who has spent all his time in the schoolroom is usually hopelessly helpless when he runs against a real circumstance. I see this remarkably illustrated in my own teaching, for I have young men from the city and from farms. The farm boy will turn his hand to twenty things where the city boy will turn his to one. The farm boy has had to meet problems and to solve them for himself: this is sometimes worth more than his entire school training. Why does the farm boy make his way when he goes to the city?

It is no mere incident to one's life that he be able to think in the thought of his own time. Even tho one expect to devote himself wholly to a dead language, he should study enough natural science and enough technology to enable him to grasp living problems. I fear that some of our institutions are still turning out men with medieval types of mind. Now, therefore, I come again to my thesis - to the statement that the end and purpose of nature study is to educate the young mind by means of the subjects within its own sphere, by appealing to its own sympathetic interest in them, in order that the person's life may be sweeter, deeper, and more resourceful. Nature study would not necessarily drive any subject from the curriculum; least of all would it depreciate the value of the 'humanities;" but it would restore to their natural and proper place the subjects that are related to the man. It would begin with things within the person's realm. If we are to interest children or grown-ups, either, for that matter- we must begin by teaching the things that touch their lives. Where there is one person that is interested in philology, there are hundreds that are interested in engines and in wheat. From the educational point of view, neither the engine nor the wheat is of much consequence, but the men who like the engines and who grow the wheat are immeasurably important and must be reached. There are five millions of farms in the United States on which chickens are raised, and millions of city and village lots also where they are grown. I would teach chickens. I would reach Men by means of the Old Hen.

How unrelated much of our teaching is to the daily life is well shown. by inquiries recently made of the children of New Jersey by Professor Earl Barnes. Inquiries were made of the country school children in two agricultural counties of the state as to what vocation they hoped to follow. As I recall the figures, of the children at seven years of age 26 cent. desired to follow some occupation connected with country life. Of those at fourteen years, only 2 per cent. desired such occupation. This

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