This little book should be used as a simple guide to the practical study
of Nature rather than as a mere reader.
Every lesson herein set down has, during the author’s many years’
experience in teaching Nature Study, been taught by observation and
practice again and again; and each time with satisfactory result. The
materials required for the lessons are within everybody’s reach.
There is nothing that appeals to the heart of the ordinary child like
_living things_, be they animal or vegetable, and there is no branch of
education at the present day that bears, in the young mind, such
excellent fruit as the study of the simple, living things around us.
Your child is nothing if not curious. He wants to understand everything
that lives in his bright little world.
Nature Study involves so many ingenious little deductions, that the
reasoning powers are almost constantly employed, and intelligence grows
proportionately. The child’s powers of observation are stimulated, and
his memory is cultivated in the way most pleasing to his inquiring
nature. By drawing his specimens, no matter how roughly or rapidly, his
eye is trained more thoroughly than any amount of enforced copying of
stiff, uninteresting models of prisms, cones, etc., ever could train it.
The love of flowers and animals is one of the most commendable traits in
the disposition of the wondering child, and ought to be encouraged above
all others. A few lessons on Nature Phenomena are added.
It is the author’s fondest and most sanguine hope that his little pupils
may study further the great book of Nature, whose broad pages are ever
open to us, and whose silent answers to our manifold questions are never
very difficult to read.