The reasons why there should not be a graded course, are: 1st. The work should be spontaneous and should be suggested each day by the material at hand. Mother Nature follows no schedule. She refuses to produce a violet one day, an oriole the next, and a blue butterfly on the third. 2d. A graded course means a hard and fast course which each teacher must follow whether or not her tastes and training coincide with it. 3d. There is no natural grading of nature-study work. A subject suited for nature-study may be given just as successfully in the first as in the fifth grade. There is only one reason why a nature-study course should be graded, and that is so cogent that it outweighs all the reasons on the other side: the training of the grade teacher in nature-study is at present so limited in subject-matter that if the course were ungraded the same work would be given over and over in the successive grades until the pupils became utterly weary of it. To many a pupil in the lower grades to-day, nature-study means the sprouting of beans and peas and nothing more. As a matter of experience, we believe that after a nature-study subject is once studied it should be dropped entirely, the pupil should not again meet it in the schoolroom until he finds it in its respective science in the high school or college. On this account, we have been persuaded that a graded course, or at least a consecutive course, is necessary. The following suggestions about grading the course are given with a hope of being helpful, and not because we believe that the courses indicated are necessarily the best courses possible. We have graded each subject so that a teacher may follow her own tastes and inclinations, and may not be forced to teach zoology when her interests are entirely with botany, or vice versa. We have tried to give a distinctive trend to the observations for each year, and have suggested a line along which the work may be done. As a matter of fact, however, the time to study any living thing is when you chance to find it. If you find an interesting caterpillar or cricket or bird, study it, whatever your grade of work. The probabilities are that it may be long before you chance upon these same species again. It has been the experience of most teachers that the lower grades are much more interested in nature-study than are the higher. Especially are the seventh and eighth grades difficult to interest. Therefore, we have made this part of the course economic in its bearing, hoping that this may appeal to the grown-up feeling of pupils of these grades. INSECTS. FIRST GRADE. The first year of work with insects may well be restricted to familiarizing the pupils with the three most striking phases in the life of insects with complete metamorphosis, _i. e._, the larvæ, the pupæ, and the winged insects. Moths and butterflies are especially adapted for this work with the small children.