interest should deepen. This will almost never be the case where the first instruction is purely technical. Nothing, for instance, has deadened the interest of children in plant life so much as the study of botany. This is because the school methods have been wrong, the work being almost always approached from the wrong end. It is because the learner's mind is dammed up by difficult and to him empty technical terms. As a consequence, the course of its flow in this direction is stopped, and instead of a clear stream leaping joyfully through the woods and meadows finally to reach the great goal of the boundless ocean, it resembles rather a motionless pond, the surface of which is covered with lifeless and unlovely debris. Naturally the child seeks to escape from this uninteresting and dead pool by turning his mental energies in other directions, and too often he loses interest forever, and with it the pleasure and the vast profit that might have come to him from a different conception of the subject.

Facts about the life of the plant should be abundantly presented, and the facts as collected and told to-day are well-nigh inexhaustible as well as fascinating. True stories of plant life can be, and should be, as interesting as any other stories. Technical terms should be used at first with great restraint, and, as a rule, only where they are obviously convenient or of such universal application that they are a distinct help in developing a sense of the continuity of living things. Those that are used should be so skilfully introduced, and their meaning so thoroughly digested, that they do not seem like technical terms.

Perhaps an illustration will make this point clearer. A child who loves flowers goes to school; he is given one of his favorites and told to pull it to pieces, look at its different parts, and label them with such words as petals, sepals, pistil, stamens; to these are presently added calyx, corolla, monopetalous, polypetalous, innate, adnate, indehiscent, etc., until the child's mind resembles a lumber room of senseless rubbish, in which the flower is buried and lost. To a sensitive child this process is exceedingly painful. He often feels as though he were murdering some helpless thing he had loved, and conceals his tears and his heartache for fear of being laughed at. Less sensitive children are soon wearied and disgusted, and the love for nature which might have been aroused in them, to the sweetening and steadying of their whole after-life, receives a fatal check.

While the child's love for flowers, and his sentiment concerning them, should not be harmed by his plant work, on the other hand a certain tendency to weak sentimentality wherever encountered should be restrained. He should not be a mere receptacle for dry ashes nor yet a mush of sentimentality. The wise leader will discover the broad middle course where love of the flower shall be deepened, and, as it were, broadened, by knowledge of its wonderful structure and functions. These can be well understood without so much as one technical term, though the skilful introduction of a few helpful words will not detract at all from the pleasure of the study, and will be most convenient.

The Anemone or Wind-Flower

Even the botanical names of the flowers themselves are of questionable value. The main thing is to recognize the flower as we recognize any other friend, and of course some name is necessary, but that this name be technical is, in most cases, not even desirable. "Wind-flower" is quite as good as "anemone," better, indeed, as it expresses a certain feeling about the flower that "anemone" does not convey. So, too, "mayflower" is more suggestive than "trailing arbutus," and that than Epigæa repens. Thus at first let the children learn only the common names of the flowers, at the same time that they discover all that is interesting about them. Later, when their interest is sure, the pretty name "anemone" will give an added charm. They can be told that it comes from the Greek word anemos, meaning wind, and that anemones grow in Greece, and all that part of the world, and are gathered by the little children there. If the children are of an age to be studying or reading the tales of mythology, or the fascinating beginnings of Greek and Roman history, they will be delighted to think that anemones were no doubt gathered by Ulysses and Hector and the other Trojan heroes when they were children in that far-away land, and that the grandson of Æneas saw them in the Campagna near the Rome he founded, as the Italian children see them to-day. Thus through his botany the child can get a more vivid sense of the life of the past, can have a link forged in that invaluable mental chain which links him, mind, body, and soul, to everything else in the universe, and the consciousness of which is one of our most precious and helpful endowments in this life.

The universality of life and mind and soul, the universality of the methods of their manifestations even, the unity of life,—nothing by itself, everything going out into and permeating everything else,—this great truth, which ought to burst upon the young mind with controlling force at a critical period later, should have its way prepared in childhood.

So far as technical terms are concerned, the child will gladly take them—in small doses—when he understands the things they represent,—that is, when the knowledge comes before the label; and when he recognizes their convenience in grouping the different varieties and species so that their relations to themselves and to other plants can be kept in the mind with a minimum of exertion.