Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 84.djvu/287

Rh no less provinces of natural history than are paleontology, botany, zoology and anthropology.

For the ends of general education, the study of natural history should beget the habit of mind of demanding the widest and exactest knowledge attainable touching any situation in life where decision and action are necessary; and it should provide the individual with a large fund of information, all so vitally correlated and intertwined as to give every faculty of the mind the greatest measure of sensitiveness and avidity for new knowledge and higher enjoyment. It should create a great complex of knowledge, the whole logical and rational substance of which should be penetrated through and through by a subdued emotional appreciation of the beauty there is in the great whole.

Such a knowledge would, perforce, hold the world in reverence even after all due regard were given to those portions of it which are unseemly and ugly and evil.

For the ends of scientific education and research, the study of such natural history would serve to counteract the tendencies toward sophistication which appear to be an inevitable concomitant of the rigorous mathematical treatment of such portions of nature as are amenable to these methods. Whatever the department of science to which any life may be dedicated, sufficient attention should be given to what is fundamentally involved in the elemental processes of observing, naming and classifying, to insure against the perils of ever fofgetting that these processes are really fundamental to all natural knowledge.

To attempt to banish these simple operations from the august presence of exact science because one may to a considerable extent carry them on more or less automatically and unconsciously is folly, sure and disastrous, no less than would be the attempt to banish one's feet from the act of walking or his hands from piano-playing, because these members may do their parts, after once being well schooled, with little or no attention to them.