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 most of the lessons—whether they be obtained from
the naturalist-dealer or from the nearest hedge, ditch, or pond—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 and moves and has its being 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 dissecting seeds, bulbs, buds, and flowers, his hand is
trained, and methods expeditious and exact are inculcated. 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.
It is the author’s fondest and most sanguine hope that the working out
of the exercises, of which this booklet is mainly composed, may prove
much more of a joy than a task, and that the practical knowledge gained
thereby may tempt his little readers to 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.