t and dark. He found to his very great surprise that these
small birds consumed in one day food to the amount of their own weight
and 56 per cent. additional. If an average-sized man were to eat at
this rate he would require seventy pounds of beef and several gallons
of water daily. Upon reaching maturity the Robins probably do not eat
so greedily, but the incident serves to illustrate their capacity in
the days of youth.

The school teachers at the Knoxville Summer School who watched the
Chipping Sparrow that morning were members of a group of earnest men
and women whose lives were dedicated to the training of children. For
nine months they had been in the classroom, meeting heroically the
petty trials and annoyances incident to their life work. Now, {243}
instead of spending their brief vacation in idleness, they were seeking
additional knowledge to prepare them for more valuable future service.
They were learning that morning the important lesson that birds are
placed on earth for a useful purpose. When they returned to the
schoolroom they would teach the boys that the bird is a friend to the
farmer and should not be killed nor its nest destroyed. They would
teach girls that there is something far more exquisite about the living
bird than is to be found in the faded lustre of its feathers when sewed
on a hat, and they would cultivate in the heart of the girls a feeling
of sympathy for the home life of the birds about them.

The greatest problem to be solved by those actively engaged in measures
which make for civic righteousness is how to preserve the children of
the country from evil influences, and to direct their curiosity and
restless energy into safe and productive channels. The teacher
occupies a strategic position in this matter, and one of her problems
is how to {244} engage the interest of the child in subjects that are
both entertaining and beneficial. Simple lessons in nature study are
an excellent method by which to accomplish this end, and a study of
out-of-door life should begin with birds.

_Bird Study Class._--The systematic instruction of school children in
bird study on a careful scientific basis in a large way really had its
origin in May, 1910, when Mrs. Russell Sage sent to the National
Association of Audubon Societies a cheque for five thousand five
hundred dollars with which to inaugurate a plan of bird study in the
Southern schools that the writer had outlined to her. She desired t