The first great result to a child of such a series of studies is an
intelligent and rational understanding of his home, the world, his
natural environment. He will have a seeing eye and an appreciative
mind for the thousand things surrounding his daily life where the
ignorant toiler sees and understands nothing.
A second advantage which we can only hint at, while incidental is
almost equally important. We have been considering nature chiefly as a
realm by itself, apart from man. But the utilities of natural science
in individual life and in society are so manifold that we accept many
of the finest products of skill and art as if they were natural
products--as if gold coins, silk dresses, and fine pictures grew on the
bushes and only waited to be picked. The thousand-fold applications of
natural science to human industry and comfort deserve to be perceived
as _the result of labor and inventive skill_. Our much-lauded steam
engines, telegraph microscopes, sewing machines, reapers, iron ships,
and printing presses, are not examples of a few, but of myriads of
things that natural science has secured. But how many children on
leaving the common school understand the principle involved in any one
of the machines mentioned, subjects of common talk as they are? As
children leave the schools at fourteen or fifteen they should know and
appreciate many such things, wherein man, by his wit and ingenious use
of natures forces, has triumphed over difficulties.
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