strongly insisted upon.
The child has a right to the pleasure, the elevation of sentiment, the
play of imagination which the contemplation of nature is able to give in
such a peculiar degree. He has a right to the romance of the flower,
cloud, bird, fish, animal life, plant life, in all their ramifications.
It is a part of his soul-development. Consequently, whatever is done for
him should be done in such a way as not to hurt his sensibilities. His
pleasure in nature should be increased, not lessened, as a result of
his study.

As his knowledge expands his interest should deepen. This will almost
never be the case where the first instruction is purely technical.
Nothing, for instance, has deadened the interest of children in plant
life so much as the study of botany. This is because the school methods
have been wrong, the work being almost always approached from the wrong
end. It is because the learner's mind is dammed up by difficult and to
him empty technical terms. As a consequence, the course of its flow in
this direction is stopped, and instead of a clear stream leaping
joyfully through the woods and meadows finally to reach the great goal
of the boundless ocean, it resembles rather a motionless pond, the
surface of which is covered with lifeless and unlovely debris. Naturally
the child seeks to escape from this uninteresting and dead pool by
turning his mental energies in other directions, and too often he loses
interest forever, and with it the pleasure and the vast profit that
might have come to him from a different conception of the subject.

Facts about the life of the plant should be abundantly presented, and
the facts as collected and told to-day are well-nigh inexhaustible as
well as fascinating. True stories of plant life can be, and should be,
as interesting as any other stories. Technical terms should be used at
first with great restraint, and, as a rule, only where they are
obviously convenient or of such universal application that they are a
distinct help in developing a sense of the continuity of living things.
Those that are used should be so skilfully introduced, and their meaning
so thoroughly digested, that they do not seem like technical terms.

Perhaps an illustration will make this point clearer. A child who loves
flowers goes to school; he is given one of his favorites and told to
pull it to pieces, look at its different parts, and label them with such
words as petals, sepals, pistil, stame