Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/464

446 In 1890 there were nearly eight thousand school gardens—gardens for practical instruction in rearing trees, vegetables, and fruits—in Austria. The Austrian public-school law reads: "In every school a gymnastic ground, a garden for the teacher, according to the circumstances of the community, and a place for the purposes of agricultural experiment are to be created. School inspectors must see to it that, in the country schools, school gardens shall be provided for corresponding agricultural instruction in all that relates to the soil, and that the teacher shall make himself skillful in such instruction. Instruction in natural history is indispensable to suitably established school gardens. The teachers, then, must be in a condition to conduct them."

In France gardening is practically taught in twenty-eight thousand primary and elementary schools, each of which has a garden attached to it, and is under the care of a master capable of imparting a knowledge of the first principles of horticulture. No one can be appointed master of an elementary school unless qualified to give practical instruction in cultivating the ordinary products of the garden.

In Sweden, as long ago as 1871, twenty-two thousand children received instruction in horticulture and tree planting, and each of two thousand and sixteen schools had for cultivation a piece of land varying from one to twelve acres.

Still more significant is the recent establishment of many school gardens in southern Russia. In one province two hundred and twenty-seven schools out of a total of five hundred and four have school gardens whose whole area is two hundred and eighty-three acres. In 1895 these gardens contained one hundred and eleven thousand fruit trees and two hundred and thirty-eight thousand three hundred planted forest trees. In them the schoolmasters teach tree, vine, grain, garden, silkworm, and bee culture. They are supported by small grants of money from the country and district councils. In the villages, small orchards and kitchen gardens are connected with many primary schools. This movement has also widely spread over different provinces of central Russia.

If the establishment of school gardens in the country is a wise step, the advantages of such gardens in cities should be apparent at once.

Since 1877 every public school in Berlin, Prussia, has been regularly supplied with plants for study every week, elementary schools receiving specimens of four different species and secondary schools six. During the summer, at six o'clock in the morning, two large wagons start from the school gardens, loaded with cuttings packed and labeled for the different schools. The daily papers