The Nature-Study Idea; An Interpretation of the New School-Movement to Put the Young Into Relation and Sympathy with Nature

by Liberty Hyde Bailey

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1909 edition. Excerpt: ... Ill The Meaning of the Nature-Study Movement IT is one of the marks of the progress of the race that we are coming more and more into sympathy with the natural world in which we dwell. The objects and phenomena become a part of our lives. They are central to our thoughts. The happiest life has the greatest number of points of contact with the world, and it has the deepest sympathy with everything that is. The best thing in life is sentiment; and the best sentiment is that which is born of the most accurate knowledge. I like to make this application of Emerson's injunction to "hitch your wagon to a star"; but it must not be forgotten that a person must have the wagon before he has the star, and he must take due care to stay in the wagon when he rides in space. Mere facts are dead, but the meaning of the facts is life. The getting of information is but the beginning of education. "With all thy getting, get understanding." Of late years there has been a rapidly growing feeling that we must live closer to nature and make our nature-sentiment vital; and we must of course begin with the child. We attempt to teach this nature-love in the schools, and we call the effort nature-study. It would be better if it were called nature-sympathy. As yet there are no recognized and regulated methods of teaching nature-study. The subject is not a formal part of the course of study; and thereby it is not perfunctory. And herein lies much of its value--in the fact that it cannot be reduced to a mere system, is not cut and dried, cannot become a part of rigid and formal school method. Its very essence is spirit. It is as free as its subject-matter, as far removed from the museum and the cabinet as the living animal is from the skeleton. It thus transpires that...

42 pages, Paperback

First published October 28, 2007

About the author

Liberty Hyde Bailey, a botanist, through teaching and numerous publications, including the six-volume Standard Cyclopedia of American Horticulture (1914-1917), transformed the science.

Liberty Hyde Bailey cofounded the society.

Born as the third son of Liberty Hyde Bailey Sr. and Sarah Harrison Bailey, farmers, Bailey entered the Michigan agricultural college in 1878 and graduated in 1882.

In the next year of 1883, he assisted the renowned Asa Gray of Harvard University. William James Beal, professor at Michigan agricultural college, arranged this assistance. Bailey spent two years as herbarium assistant of Gray. He met Annette Smith, the daughter of a cattle breeder, at the Michigan agricultural college and in the same year married her. She bore Sara May Bailey in 1887 and Ethel Zoe Bailey in 1889. He in 1885 moved to Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and in 1888 assumed the practical and experimental chair.

The academy of arts elected him an associate fellow in 1900. He founded the college of agriculture and in 1904 ably secured public funding. From 1903, he served as dean of New York state college of agriculture to 1913. In 1908, Theodore Roosevelt, president, appointed him chairman of the national commission on country life. Its Report of 1909 called for rebuilding a great agricultural civilization. He edited agriculture from 1907 to 1909 and continued with the Rural Textbook, Gardencraft, and Young Folks Library, series of manuals. He founded and edited the journals Country Life and the Cornell Countryman.

In 1913, he retired to devote more time as a private scholar to social and political issues. In 1917, people elected him as a member of the national academy of the United States.

He dominated the field of literature and wrote a collection of poetry and sixty-five books, which together sold more than a million copies, works; his efforts explained to laypeople, and he edited more than a hundred books of other authors and at least 1.3 thousand articles and more than one hundred papers in pure taxonomy. He also coined the words "cultivar," "cultigen," and "indigen." His most significant and lasting contributions studied cultivated plants.