Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/746

726 (tricinctus) which does not dig a hole in the ground for its nest. The book, written by a man who did not know an armadillo from a mud-turtle, gives this piece of information. It was in the lesson, and the students must get it. And on this and like subjects these boys and girls were wasting their precious time—precious because, if they do not learn to observe in their youth, they will never learn, and the horizon of their lives will be always narrower and darker than it should have been. Already the work of that day is a blank. They have forgotten the nine-banded armadillo and the three-banded, and so has their teacher, and so have I. All that remains with them is a mild hatred of the armadillo and of the edentates in general, and a feeling of relief at being no longer under their baleful influence. But with this usually goes the determination never to study zoölogy again. And when these students later come to the college, they know no more of science and its methods than they did when at the age of one year they first cried for the moon.

Darwin tells us that his early instruction in geology was so "incredibly dull "that he came to the determination, afterward happily changed, "never so long as he lived to read a book on geology or in any way to study the subject."

I once had a student, well trained in the conventional methods of non-science, who was set to observe the yeast-plant under the microscope. He had read what the books say about yeast, and had looked at the pictures. So he went to work vigorously. In a short time he had found out all about the little plant, and had made a series of drawings which showed it very nicely. By and by some one noticed that he was working without any object-glass in his microscope. He had not seen the yeast-plant at all, only the dust on the eye-piece. This is the vital fault of much of our teaching of elementary science. It is not real; it is not the study of nature, only of the dust-heaps of old definitions.

Yet nothing is easier than to do fairly good teaching, even without special knowledge or special appliances. Bring out your specimens and set them before the boys and girls. They will do the work, and do it eagerly; and they will furnish the specimens too. There is no difficulty about materials. Our New World is the "El Dorado" of the naturalists of Europe. You can get materials for a week's work by turning over a single rotten log. I once heard Prof. Agassiz say to an assembly of teachers, and I quote from him the more freely because he gave his life to the task of the introduction of right methods into American schools:

"Select such subjects that your students can not walk out without seeing them. If you can find nothing better, take a house-fly or a cricket, and let each one hold a specimen while you speak. ... There is no part of the country where, in the summer, you