Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/471

Rh the garden will afford the pupils their only opportunities for studying, describing, drawing, and painting such insects.

How the garden is supported, and how the necessary work is done, are interesting questions to those who think of starting a garden. Since 1891 the Massachusetts Horticultural Society has offered every year a premium of fifteen dollars for the best school garden, in connection with the best use of it. This garden has competed with others, and won the premium every year. Five dollars pays for the annual enrichment of the soil, and ten dollars for the labor of the janitor, who, during the long summer vacation, weeds, hoes, and waters the plants, and cuts the grass periodically. In spring he wheels in and spreads fertilizing material, prepares new beds or rows, and resets old ones with plants changed from other localities. During the school season in spring and autumn teachers and pupils do considerable work in weeding and transplanting; the former being able to distinguish choice plants, however small, from weeds, which many a so-called good gardener is frequently unable to do.

Reasons that are good for introducing the elements of science into elementary schools are equally good for supplying adequate and seasonable elementary science material to work upon. Plants are so available for the purposes of instruction, their structure, uses, and functions are so varied and interesting, that it is generally conceded that the best elementary science material on the whole is found in the vegetable world.

The repulsion that is so often felt in studying animals or animal physiology is unknown in studying plants, and the cycle of plant life from seed to seed furnishes a lesson in biology that is unsurpassed in value. Moreover, living plants, out of doors, are necessarily connected with mineral forms—air, earth, and water—as well as with various forms of animal life—butterflies, moths, beetles, wasps, ants, grubs, and worms—all together furnishing constant illustrations of correlation under the best conditions.

The elements of zoölogy may be studied in the schoolroom with some profit by means of dried and alcoholic specimens, skeletons, diagrams, and books, but visible correlation will of necessity be wholly left out. The same may be said of mineralogy or mineral substances generally. But in the school garden the interdependence of animals, plants, and minerals is always obvious, and teachers and pupils can take advantage of it without taking time and money to go to the country for the purpose of seeing the three kingdoms of Nature properly related. Of course, the excursion is better in many respects, since many instructive things may be seen which are not possible for a school garden; but the excursion at best is seldom practicable. On the school premises, pupils are