Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/472

 much more amenable to control and instruction than on an excursion. Without the school garden the great masses of children in cities will never have their attention directed to the great lessons of Nature in any telling way. Some of them may visit the country, but very few will have efficient direction, and the results will be meager.

It is too much to expect that teachers, especially those in city schools, will unremittingly supply fresh material whenever needed for instruction in the elements of science. Even in the country the



most desirable plants are often far from the school. It would be a most extraordinary school district where fourteen golden-rods, eighteen wild asters, and twenty-nine ferns, all different kinds, might be found growing. Probably half of the plants that would flourish in a school garden could not be found in the district at all; or, if they could, they would be scattered and remote from the school, and whether they were in a proper state of development for study could not always be ascertained easily. The nearness of the school garden is one of its most valuable features.

A book might be written on the educational value of a school garden properly used; but mention of its main advantages must suffice. Besides the opportunity for correlation, previously mentioned, it gives the opportunity for bringing together a great number of plants to be classified and arranged in families, genera, and species.