sold to the school children at one cent each for home planting. This covered the entire expense, including printed directions for planting and cultivation. The first year (1900) nearly 49,000 packages were sold and planted. The second year nearly 122,000 packages, or 4581⁄2 pounds, were sold, besides several thousand bulbs. Three annual reports have been issued, and they are very interesting reading. To speak of the effect on schools and homes would but repeat the experiences of Bloomington.

The Outlook for May 2, 1903, contains a fascinating article entitled "The First Children's School Farm in New York City." I imagine there could be few more hopeless undertakings than this garden, begun. late in the season of 1902, on a patch of land only one-fourth of an acre, hitherto used as a dumping ground for rubbish, in one of the most congested districts of New York. But it was a triumphant success. The

land was cultivated by children in individual gardens three feet by six, and the effect of these gardens on a neighborhood where before only vandalism reigned is absolutely startling. I pray you find the article and read it.

"Afford it?" What sort of investment would be too large for such returns? A bonded debt upon every village and every city of this country, sufficiently large to provide a suitable yard with garden attached for every public school, would be an obligation that the next generation might well afford to meet and be thankful for.

And what of the country schools? From one end of our great country to the other the most unlovely, lonesome, forlorn, uncared-for, and God-forsaken premises to be found are the country schoolhouses and school yards; and this in the older as well as in the younger states. A country school can be identified as far as it can be seen by its ugliness.

The life of the farm in no way enters into the instruction of the school. We teach the country girls and boys about banking, brokerage, stocks and bonds, and the foreign exchange peculiar to schoolhouses. We teach obsolete compound numbers and compound proportion which never existed outside of a schoolhouse. Days and weeks of instruction are given to the greatest common divisor and to fourstory complex-fraction monstrosities; but never a word about the soil; the growth of crops, which make the farm life possible; or of trees, shrubs, and flowers, which may make the farm home so beautiful. The country school has undoubtedly been a considerable factor in the mighty exodus from the farms to the villages and cities. It is time that a halt and an about-face be called in the great procession. The possibilities of comfort, freedom, and health; of competence and happiness; of the dignity and beauty of labor as connected with farm life-should be exploited in the country schools. Fill the curriculum with material having to do with. country life and give the business processes of city and village a rest. They need it, and so do the children.

The rural delivery of mail, the daily paper, and the telephone will lend their aid in making the isolation of the farmer's home less acute. The school and the home must come into close sympathy thru what is taught in the school, and the knowledge of the teacher as to the farm. and its interests.

These must be brought close to the school thru the planning and planting of the school ground, which shall have ample space for playgrounds and a garden. The average price of land surrounding country schools does not exceed fifty dollars per acre. The very minimum yard should contain an acre. There are several in Cook county, each containing ten square rods or less. I know of many quarter-acre school yards. laid out when land was at government price-314 cents for a school yard for a hundred years or even longer.

In a way country children are familiar with growing plants, but rarely are the plants of interest to them as matter for study, either as to their wonderful growth or their beauty. They are taken as a matter of course in the getting of the farm living; and it comes to pass that hill, vale, and prairie, with their abundance of trees, shrubs, clambering vines, flowering. plants, and grasses, make little impress upon the characters of the children. Hence the wealth of natural beauty in the farm surroundings ist rarely counted as an asset of the farm life.

Here is the opportunity for the country school. The school yard should be an object-lesson in attractiveness to all dwellers of the district, because it is more beautiful than any other yard. Its trees should be the handsomest, its trailing vines the most tasteful, its shrubs the most thrifty, and its flowers the most beautiful. The taste and appreciation of the children should be as vitally the care of the teacher as is their learning to spell or to add and subtract.

The sordid scramble after dollars, the long hours of monotonous toil, especially on the part of farmers' wives, have more than any other one cause furnished the inmates for insane hospitals; and the number and magnitude of these hospitals are frightful. What is needed in the farmers' homes is healthful mental stimulus; and this must be the outgrowth of the schools.

A schoolmaster in Sangamon county, Ill., had an idea, and it grew into a country school garden-the only one I know of in the state with its twelve thousand country schools. The school was closed from May 13 to September 1, which fact would seem to preclude success; but the idea of the schoolmaster meant business, and it succeeded. In all of the wonderfully fertile prairie of that portion of the great state, that little garden 38 by 40 feet is the most significant thing and promises to make Cottage Hill and Schoolmaster Pruitt famous. It has revolutionized the spirit of the school and the sentiment of the district. Suppose that twelve thousand Pruitts should bless the twelve thousand country

districts of Illinois for the next ten years. The results in scholarship, in manners and morals, in good health and good citizenship are almost beyond the power of imagination.

Who shall be equal to these things? The teachers of America, of course. What can be done in Sweden and Austria can be done in the United States. For the scholars, an admixture of Mother Earth, grow. ing plants, fresh air, and blue sky, with their book lessons, will make healthier and happier children. For the teachers, a part of the lessons out of doors, the making of beautiful school yards and school gardens, the preparation in healthful study and planning necessary thereto, and less of school-room drudgery and examination papers on subjects often uninteresting either to pupil or teacher, will make healthier, happier, and more effective teachers.

SCHOOL GARDENS

HENRY LINCOLN CLAPP, PRINCIPAL OF THE GEORGE PUTNAM SCHOOL, BOSTON, MASS.

I have noticed, during the last twenty years especially, that most city children have few responsibilities placed upon them, do exceedingly little manual labor, and get almost no physical exercise in that way. So physical exercises are required of them in the schoolroom. "Shoulder arms!” and "Hips firm!" are overworked commands. Here compulsion has the whole field; spontaneity nothing.

Several years ago, as I was thinking over the nature of physical exercises in the schoolroom, I thought of the possibilities of the garden in view of my own experience with it for more than half a century. I said to myself: Here is the thing for the children. Here is an opportunity for spontaneity, responsibility, and the exercise of every muscle in the body that needs to be exercised. Here the children can dig in the earth, as nearly all children like to do; can study plant growth under the most favorable conditions; and can take vigorous physical exercise without being conscious of it or being forced to it.

So three years ago a vegetable garden was established for the instruction and exercise of some of the children in the George Putnam School, Roxbury District, Boston. The lot used was four rods square. Formerly a man had used it for a garden; but, having lain fallow for a number of years, it was overgrown with stout turf when the thought of converting it into a school garden occurred. A friend plowed it free of charge, and the children of the seventh grade, averaging about thirteen years of age, did the remainder of the work. The surface after the plowing was very rough. Elevations and depressions were to be brought to a common level. There were sods to turn under; grass roots to bury beyond the prospect of

trouble; beds and paths to mark out and make; fertilizing material to bring in and work into the soil; and finally many kinds of vegetable and flower seeds to plant in various ways. A great deal of hard work was done with evident pleasure in making and planting the beds.

Eighty-two beds, each eight feet long and three and a half feet wide, were made and planted with seeds of lettuce, radish, beet, turnip, parsnip, parsley, carrot, cabbage, kohl-rabi, onion, peanut, beans, peas, corn, tomatoes, potatoes, and a great variety of flower seeds.

Potatoes were raised only one year, on account of the advent of a multitude of potato bugs. Altho the beetles were treated with Paris green and the most persistent hostility, what we raised that year were "pretty small potatoes and few in a hill." The devotion of the children was not sufficient to cope with the insect pests.

Why is it that in the widespread awakening to the educational value of the school garden the vegetable garden or the flower garden is generally admitted? The vegetable garden commends itself as a practical thing. The produce can be eaten or sold for money, which can be put in a bank or used for purchasing various desirable things. In other words, it will pay. Cultivated flowers-roses, pinks, pansies, nasturtiums, and chrysanthemums- make a fine display of color, can be used for decoration, and sold readily even by school children. Their cultivation will pay.

No doubt we should use motives that will move; but there are motives better than mercenary. ones. Generally one who studies shells, minerals, mosses, lichens, algæ, ferns, the flowers of the field, color, music, literature, and similar subjects does not associate them with money values, but he studies them for the pleasure they bring, with the desire to know, to understand, to lay up resources for happiness, and to be of service to those interested in such studies. It is happiness and satisfaction. which should be provided for to a degree by the establishment of the school garden.

In this regard the German school gardens seem to have a more philosophical basis than ours. They are intended to furnish the most direct means of teaching school children, not only to raise vegetables and cultivated plants, but to know the flora of their own province-the trees, shrubs, ferns; medicinal, coloring, oil-bearing, aromatic, poisonous, fibrous, and other kinds of plants, classified according to their uses in the arts, as well as those illustrating botanical families. There is nothing uncertain about that kind of nature study, nothing lifeless about that sort of botanical instruction. So the scope of their gardens is very much broader than that of ours. They take in more than the market gardener and the professional florist attempt. Botany is considered worth teaching. in the higher institutions of learning, its educational value is recognized. and provided for, and so it is introduced early and in the proper manner in the common schools. There is a practicality about the whole system

that we in America have not yet reached. The vegetable garden or cultivated flower garden, without the botanical garden, does not complete the scheme of outdoor instruction which the German educator has in mind. He prizes sound scholarship more than land, more than something to eat, more than something for decoration.

With the botanical part of the German school garden in view, our wildflower garden, now including about one hundred and fifty species of native plants, was begun in 1890. The purpose was to acquaint teachers and pupils with the life-history of the common wild flowers and to furnish some available material for plant study in the schoolroom.

For eight years pupils of the ninth grade in the George Putnam school have studied ferns delightedly, and therefore successfully, by means of an excellent equipment consisting of a fine collection of herbarium. specimens for winter use, a collection of one hundred and fifty lantern slides illustrating nearly every phase of the life history of ferns for use at any time and, best of all, all the species studied growing in the fernery for observation during the spring and fall. So the pupils studied the cycle of fern life from the spore thru the prothallus, crozier, and frond with its sori forward to the spore again. Annulus, sporangium, indusium, pinna, and pinnule were as familiar to them as chalk, pencil, and paper. So they studied fifteen species, most of which they recognized at sight in their habitat, not only by their specific characteristics, but by the generic as well. More than half the members of each class made fern gardens at their homes. During their summer vacations they sought out the wellknown species in woods and meadows, made herbarium collections, took prizes on them at Horticultural Hall, and even interested and assisted teachers in the study of ferns.

The number of women who raise flowers and are fond of gardening, without any regular schooling therein, is well-nigh countless. So city children especially should have all possible opportunities to find out whether they have natural tastes for such work.

The Boston Normal School is training teachers in garden work in a fine garden established two years ago on the grounds of the English High School, Dartmouth street, Boston.

About three centuries ago Francis Bacon wrote: "God Almighty first planted a garden, and, indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures; it is the greatest refreshment to the spirits of man, without which building and palaces are but gross handiworks." During the past three hundred years our city-bred people apparently have made little or no progress toward realizing Bacon's idea of the purest form of human pleasure. They try to find pleasure in nearly everything except gardens, perhaps for the reason that in childhood they had no opportunities to acquire a taste for gardening. City school gardens, and teachers trained in normal schools to conduct them, will change this unfavorable condition and