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With our children, the study of words and abstractions alone may, in its degree, produce the same results. Nature-studies have long been valued as a "means of grace," because they arouse the enthusiasm, the love of work which belongs to open-eyed youth. The child blasé with moral precepts and irregular conjugations turns with delight to the unrolling of ferns and the song of birds.
Association with these, under right direction, will build up a habit of truthfulness, which the lying story of the cherry-tree is powerless to effect. If history is to be made an agency for moral training, it must become a nature-study. It must be the study of original documents. When it is pursued in this way it has the value of other nature-studies. But it is carried on under great limitations.
Burbank was able to give nearly his whole time to his nature-studies. His energy is tireless, and his aim is to supply to humanity something for beauty, sustenance, or commerce better than it has possessed. Perhaps among all his productions the greatest good to the world will arise from the spineless cactus.
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