Make this chapter, as far as you can, the one in the volume for most intensive study. Show the pupils how the study of animal life is connected with geology, tell them of the record of life in the fossils of the rocks, the kinds of strange beasts that once inhabited the earth. Show them again how the study of animals in their anatomy is not the study of one--say of man, but how man and all the mammals, the reptiles, the birds, the fishes, the insects, on and on back to the single-celled amœba, are all related to each other, all links in one long wonder chain of life. FOR THE PUPIL PAGE 94 _Charles Lamb:_ Look up his life in the Encyclopedia. Read for yourselves his essay on Roast Pig. _modus edibilis_: the Latin for “manner of eating.” PAGE 95 _the ’possum’s relations:_ They are the marsupials, the pouched animals, like the kangaroo. PAGE 98 _reptilian age_: one of the great geological ages or eras, known to the geologists as the great mesozoic or “middle” epoch, when reptiles ruled the land and sea. PAGE 103 _smiles at you--grins:_ Read the account of this habit in the opening chapter of the author’s “Wild Life Near Home.” CHAPTER X TO THE TEACHER This chapter and the next go together--this for the lover of wild life, the next for the lover of adventure. The spring freshet is one of the most interesting of the year of days for animal study--better even than the day after the first snowfall. But more than this, let both chapters suggest to you how primitive and elemental the real world is after all; with what cataclysmal forces the seasons are changed. As summer often passes into autumn with a silencing frost that rests like a hush of awe over the land; so winter often gives way to spring with a rush of wind and tidal powers that seem to shake the foundations of the world. To feel these forces, to be a part of all these moods, to share in all these feelings--this, too, is one of the ends of nature-study. CHAPTER XII TO THE TEACHER I should like to repeat here the suggestions in “The Fall of the Year” for this corresponding chapter. I will repeat only: “that _you_ are the teacher, not the book. The book is but a suggestion. You begin where it leaves off; you fill out where it is lacking.” For these are not all the sounds of winter; indeed they may not be the characteristic sounds in your neighborhood. No matter: the lesson is not this or that sound, but that your pupils _learn to listen_ for sounds, for the voices of the season, whatever those voices may be in their own particular region. The trouble is that we have ears, and literally hear not, eyes and see not, souls and feel not. Teach your pupils to use their eyes, ears, yes and _hearts_, and all things else will be added unto them in the way of education. FOR THE PUPIL I