THE BIOLOGIST EDUCATOR III.

" CHAPTER II THE BIOLOGIST EDUCATOR Progress, man's distinctive mark alone, Not God's, and not the beasts': God is, they are, Man partly is and wholly hopes to be.

It is quoted here, because, for her conception of right surroundings for young children, the speaker has gone to the very source from which Froebel took his ideasshe has gone to what Froebel indeed called "the only true source, life itself," and she writes from the point of view of the biologist.

In order to make this clear, it is proposed to compare the theories of Froebel with the conclusions of a biologist.

In the address, from which the opening words of this chapter are quoted, it is suggested that a capable biologist be set to deal with education, but he is to be freed "from all preconceived ideas derived from accepted tradition."

After such fundamentals as food and warmth, light, air and sleep, the first problems considered by this Biologist Educator are stages of growth, their appropriate activities, and the stimuli necessary to evoke them.

" To discover the natural activities of the child, the biologist relies upon, first, observation of the child himself, secondly, upon his knowledge of the nervous system, and thirdly, upon his knowledge of the past history of the race.

It was because Froebel was himself, even in 1826, the Biologist Educator desiring to break with preconceived ideas and traditions that he wished one of his pupils had been able to "call your work by its proper name, and so make evident the real nature of the new spirit you have introduced.

But Froebel was more than a biologist, he was a philosopher and an idealist.

And it is impossible fully to understand why Froebel laid so much stress on spontaneous play unless we go deeper than the province of the biologist without in the least minimising the importance of biological knowledge to educational theory.

As the biologist defines play as "the natural manifestation of the child's activities," so Froedel says "play at first is just natural life."

According to Froebel, "the aim of education is the steady progressive development of mankind, there is and can be no other"; and, except as regards physiological knowledge inaccessible in his day, he is at one with the biologist as to how we are to find out the course of this development.

The motto of the biologist on the subject of interference"When in doubt, refrain"exactly expresses Froebel's doctrine of "passive or following" education, following, that is, the nature of the child, and "passive" as opposed to arbitrary interference.

Is he not in truth collecting material for his future life building?" The "box of counters, and the red-veined stone," the brilliant quaint leaf, the twig, the bit of straw, all the child's treasuresthese are the stimuli which, according to the biologist educator, must be supplied if the activities appropriate to each stage are to be called forth.

we quoted the biologist educator's ideal conception of the surroundings best suited to bring about right development.

Opinions have varied from ancient national aphorisms to the effect that women have no souls to the most ultramodern utterances of biologist-publicists that the differences between men and women are the differences between two species.

The effects of environment in producing changes in an organism, the changes the biologist sums up as adaptation, can be tracked in many instances to responsive reactions of the glands of internal secretion to demands made upon them by changed external conditions.

While Haeckel is a biologist, Ostwald’s brilliant work was done in chemistry and physics.

Looney received it cautiously, and his great watery eyes gazed at Alfred with the awe of a biologist who watches a new law of nature at work.

Edward W. Nelson Biologist.

Dennis G. Lillie M.A., Biologist in Ship.

SEE Feuchtwanger, Lion. MULLER, H. J. Out of the night; a biologist's view of the future.

Thomas Edward Shields, biologist, psychologist, educator.

BISCHOFF, THEODOR LUDWIG WILHELM, distinguished biologist, born at Hanover; made a special study of embryology; was professor of Anatomy at Heidelberg, of Physiology at Giessen, and of both at Münich (1807-1882).

The biologist's world would probably have been just as rational if the famous ape-like progenitor of man had chanced to become his offspring-assuming an original environment favorable for such transformation.