deferred until after eighteen. The juvenile well as the cyclone revivalist should
be very carefully excluded; and yet in every springtime, when nature is
recreated, service and teaching should gently encourage the revival and even the
regeneration of all the religious instincts. The mission recruiter should be
allowed to do his work outside these halls, and everything in the way of
infection and all that brings religion into conflict with good taste and good sense
should be excluded, while esthetics should supplement, reënforce, and go hand
in hand with piety. Religion is in its infancy; and woman, who has sustained it in
the past, must be the chief agent in its further and higher development.
Orthodoxies and all narrowness should forever give place to cordial hospitality
toward every serious view, which should be met by the method of greater
sympathy rather than by that of criticism.
Nature in her many phases should, of course, make up a large part of the entire
curriculum, but here again the methods of the sexes should differ somewhat after
puberty. The poetic and mythic factors and some glimpses of the history of
science should be given more prominence; the field naturalist rather than the
laboratory man of technic should be the ideal especially at first; nature should be
taught as God's first revelation, as an Old Testament related to the Bible as a
primordial dispensation to a later and clearer and more special one. Reverence
and love should be the motive powers, and no aspect should be studied without
beginning and culminating in interests akin to devotion. Mathematics should be
taught only in its rudiments, and those with special talents or tastes for it should
go to agamic schools. Chemistry, too, although not excluded, should have a
subordinate place. The average girl has little love of sozzling and mussing with
the elements, and cooking involves problems in organic chemistry too complex
to be understood very profoundly, but the rudiments of household chemistry
should be taught. Physics, too, should be kept to elementary stages. Meteorology
should have a larger, and geology and astronomy increasingly larger places, and
are especially valuable because, and largely in proportion as, they are taught out
of doors, but the general principles and the untechnical and practical aspects
should be kept in the foreground. With botany more serious work should be
done. Plant-lore and the poetic aspect, as in astronomy, should have attention
throughout, while Latin nomenclature and microscopic technic should come late
if at all, and vulgar names should have precedence over Latin terminology.
Flowers, gardening, and excursions should never be wanting. Economic and
even medical aspects should appear, and prominent and early should come the
whole matter of self cross-fertilization and that by insects. The moral value of
this subject will never be fully understood till we have what might almost be