under right direction, will build up a
habit of truthfulness, which the lying story of the cherry-tree is
powerless to effect. If history is to be made an agency for moral
training, it must become a nature-study. It must be the study of
original documents. When it is pursued in this way it has the value of
other nature-studies. But it is carried on under great limitations.
Its manuscripts are scarce, while every leaf on the tree is an original
document in botany. When a thousand are used, or used up, the archives
of nature are just as full as ever.

From the intimate affinity with the problems of life, the problems of
nature-study derive a large part of their value. Because life deals
with realities, the visible agents of the overmastering fates, it is
well that our children should study the real, rather than the
conventional. Let them come in contact with the inevitable, instead of
the "made-up," with laws and forces which can be traced in objects and
forms actually before them, rather than with those which seem arbitrary
or which remain inscrutable. To use concrete illustrations, there is a
greater moral value in the study of magnets than in the distinction
between _shall_ and _will_, in the study of birds or rocks than in that
of diacritical marks or postage-stamps, in the development of a frog
than in the longer or the shorter catechism, in the study of things
than in the study of abstractions. There is doubtless a law underlying
abstractions and conventionalities, a law of catechisms, or
postage-stamps, or grammatical solecisms, but it does not appear to the
student. Its consideration does not strengthen his impression of
inevitable truth. There is the greatest moral value, as well as
intellectual value, in the independence that comes from knowing, and
knowing that one knows and why he knows. This gives spinal column to
character, which is not found in the flabby goodness of imitation or
the hysteric virtue of suggestion. Knowing what is right, and why it
is right, before doing it is the basis of greatness of character.

The nervous system of the animal or the man is essentially a device to
make action effective and to keep it safe. The animal is a machine in
action. Toward the end of motion all other mental processes tend. All
functions of the brain, all forms of nerve impulse are modifications of
the simple reflex action, the automatic transfer of sensations derived
from external objects into mo