Professor Hanna, head of the Department of Natural History of
the Board of Education, New York, divided an open lot into some
three hundred little garden plots, took boys from the Bowery
district, and girls as well. Each child spaded up its own
ground, planted its seeds, pulled out the weeds, and watched
the ruddy vegetables grow. A thousand questions arose to these
city-born children. Given a black clod and a drop of rain-water,
and a few seeds, how does the same clod make a beet red, and a
carrot a golden hue? How could one clod condense the smells of
a whole soap factory, into one little onion? How does a potato
come to have starch in it? If one bunch of green weeds is worth
ten cents for spinach, why doesn’t everybody in Wall Street go
to farming? When some of the boys reached the Bowery Saturday
night, the first question they asked their fathers was: “How
much it would take to buy a ticket to Dakota.” Ah, Wordsworth,
looking across the field, and writing, “My heart with rapture
thrills and dances with the daffodils,” and Ruskin with his
confession of what the fields and brooks did for his culture,
throw a pathetic light on the lives of the little waifs of
the tenement-house, starved for an outlook on the grass and
the wave, and the shrub and the flower. Plainly the child has
a right to its outlook upon the world of nature.--N. D.
HILLIS.
(365)
=Children and Music=--See MUSIC AND CHILDREN.
=Children and the Bible=--See ADAPTING THE BIBLE.