Volume 1

The book of nature study / edited by J. Bretland Farmer ; assisted by a staff of specialists.

Date:
[1908?]-1909
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: The book of nature study / edited by J. Bretland Farmer ; assisted by a staff of specialists. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    the most essential difference is. The teacher who knows his business will certainly not trouble the young mind with attempts at defining life ; but, as a real acquaintance with living creatures grows wider and deeper, he may help the pupils to feel more vividly and precisely that plants and animals have more in common with them than stones or clouds or machines have. He may help the senior pupils to feel the difficulty of arriving at any sort of idea of what livingness means. The following summary may be found useful. (a) From the Biologist's Point of View.—Living creatures have the power of growing, of growing not as a snowball grows, but by a unifying incorporation; nor even as a crystal grows, at the expense of dissolved material chemically the same as itself, but at the expense of material quite different from itself. The grass grows at the expense of air, water, and salts, which, with the sun’s help, it lifts into the circle of life, and at the expense of the grass the weaned foal grows into a horse. [Show the growth of a crystal of alum. Contrast different kinds of food.] Another characteristic of living creatures is their cyclical development. The germ of a plant or animal develops quickly or slowly into an adult; this gives origin to new lives, and then there is a quick or slow down-grade ending in death. Out of the apparent simplicity of the embryo the obvious complexity of the full-grown creature develops; but, as Huxley put it, “ no sooner has the edifice, reared with such exact elaboration, at- tained completeness than it begins to crumble.” We find not- living things passing from one form to another—the water vapour gathering around dust-particles becomes mist, which rises into a cloud, which is dissolved in raindrops, which freeze into hailstones, which melt into water, and so on ; but in the development of the living creatures there is orderly progress, in part regulated from within, and there is a continuation of the race though the individuals die. [Arrange a series showing transformations in not-living things, e.g. vapour, fluid, solid forms of the same substance. Arrange a series showing the development of a plant or animal, e.g. seed, seedling, sapling, flowering branch ; or, the life-history of a butterfly or beetle.