OUT-OF-DOORS IN THE SCHOOLROOM.
THE school-children of to-day are luckier than their prede- cessors of ten years ago in many ways, but in none more than the new interest which has been brought into the schoolroom by what has come to be called "Nature study." Perhaps the first noticeable stage of the development of the new idea was Mr. J. C. Mead's Nature Study Exhibition in 1902. Since then the notion has caught on rapidly, and there h La been a perfect flood of books published on the subject, some of them bad, and many of them very superficial, it is true, but nearly all of them doing something to supply a real demand. Still, not all the demand seems to be supplied, if we may judge from the preface of an exceptionally interesting little book, " How to Teach Nature Study," just published (Sidgwick and Jackson, 3s. 6d. net). The author is Mr. T. W. Hoare, Lecturer in Nature Study to various Scottish Committees and County Councils, and he tells us that one of the great difficulties is the teacher. The children want to learn, but the teacher does not know what or how to teach. Very naturally, for the subject was not taught in schools years ago. Mr. Hoare, to meet the difficulty, has provided in his book a regular course through which any energetic man or woman could take a class of children with little in the way of expense ; incidentally, he will probably induce more than a few persons who are not teachers to try his experiments for themselves.
A great deal of the suggested course deals, as would be expected, with the life-history of various small animals, butterflies and moths and spiders and ants, and water- creatures in aquariums, and experiments with accommodating companions such as frogs and toads. Much has been written about aquariums already, of course ; but we do not recollect at the moment any mention of the training of sticklebacks to jump out of the water to take worms or beef. Mr. Hoare, apparently, has so trained his sticklebacks. Tadpoles, if they are to grow to a large and healthy size, we are told, should be fed on beef tied to a string, and these beef-fed tadpoles can be made to illustrate in an interesting way their methods of protecting themselves against their enemies, of which a tad- pole has many. The warning which a pond-bred tadpole gets of the approach of a fish is a disturbance in the water. When the water is disturbed he sinks to the bottom, and hopes, since he is mud-coloured, to escape in the mud. In a tank, if you tap the side, he sinks to the bottom, the tapping causing a vibration in the water like that of the fins of a fish. Another good experiment with water is to show the way in which various animals can change their colour. If you place a frog in a shallow dish of water and cover him with an earthen- ware jar, in an hour he will have turned almost black. Or take sticklebacks out of a tank where they live among waterweed and put them into a yellow or brown basin with only fresh water in it. Five minutes is enough to change them from green to amber or brown. Years ago the school- room only knew of one beast who could change his colour, and that was the chameleon; but even he only lived in books or the Zoological Gardens. Now, we learn, he lives in school- rooms and eats scraps from the table, but he is rather expen- sive; he costs from four shillings to a guinea. A guinea chameleon sounds a desirable addition to a schoolroom ; but the really bold and admirable departure is not the manage- ment of aquaria or pets in cages, but nothing less than the breeding of trout. Trout bred by a governess! It has been
done often. Mr. Hoare is quite explicit. He gives you the name of a fishery in Scotland where you can buy eyed ova for a shilling a hundred, and all you want to keep the ova in is a large wide-mouthed bottle through which you run a supply of water by means of two tubes. The ova hatch out about sixty or seventy days after the fish have spawned, and when the young trout have absorbed their yolk-sacs and are ready for other food, they can be transferred to a hatching- box, say sixteen inches by six inches by six inches, and there fed on yolk of egg. Thus, given merely a. tap of running water which can be spared from duty, the eggs and the young fish can be kept under the observation of a class of children from November till the following June, when they get too big to be kept in a box. "After you have fed the young fry for a few weeks, send them to the nearest stream," says Mr. Hoare. But surely somebody would buy them.
Some. of the other creatures which can be kept under observation with very little trouble are spiders and ants. To keep a spider, you just put a single one into a glass jam-pot, and encase the jam-pot with paper, pasting the overlapping ends so that the pot can be lifted in and out of the paper cylinder. The spider will soon fill the jar with web, and all that you then have to do is to fling in a fly now and then, and to spray the inside of the mouth from time to time, as spiders need water. Ants are a little more difficult, especially horse ants, which are large and active. The way to get them is to have a wooden box, about fifteen inches by ten inches by nine inches, and to cut windows in each side, over which you fasten iron gauze. Then you go where horse ants are, and " select the largest and strongest ant-hill in the wood, and with a spade cut down into it until you secure two or three queens." You put the queens into the box and fill up with as much of the ant-hill and as many ants as will go in. Then the box is placed in the middle of a tub, supported on blocks of wood, the floor of the tub is covered with water, which ants will not cross if they can help it, and the lid is removed. The ants swarm as they please, and are fed on honey from a pill-box placed at the foot of the hill. An interesting point to get children to notice in the wood is the number of domestic animals which live with the ants,—woodlice, beetles, and centipedes as scavengers, and aphides as "ant-cows" The Nature-course suggested is not wholly concerned with animals. Botany, chemistry, and physics all come into it; there are practical demonstrations, for instance, with ice and snow, buds and twigs, seeds, soils, climbing plants, the properties of the atmosphere, and so on. A good example of an experiment to illustrate botanical facts and known physical laws is the procedure for teaching the powers and properties of plants' roots. A child is told to look at the root-hairs of a plant, and he learns that each of these root- hairs is simply a single epidermal cell grown out into a long, narrow sack. Then he is shown how these sacks work. A test tube is filled with brine, its mouth is covered with a piece of membrane or parchment, and it is placed in a dish of pure water. After a day's soaking, the test tube is lifted out, and it will be found that the membrane has swollen up almost to bursting, through the brine having sucked pure water into the tube. Also a little brine has soaked through into the dish of water. This is exactly the action of a root-hair. The root- hair is filled with an acid sap, which is a denser liquid than rain- water, and therefore by a known law of capillary attraction pulls the thinner liquid up into itself, at the same time mingling very slightly with the rain-water and other sub- stances outside the root-hair. Thus the child learns the power which roots possess of soaking up water from the soil, and also, by exuding acid sap, of dissolving the adjacent particles of soil and drinking them up in a liquid form. It is a simple experiment, but, like nearly all the others in the course of lessons suggested, it is exactly the kind which a child would most easily understand. Indeed, the course might be recommended as a whole to persons of all ages capable of a tendency to get back into the schoolroom.
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