Ebook The Story of the Prairies

How many of the readers of this book understand what is meant by the words Landscape Geology? Every one has seen a landscape, but we often hear people speak about Geology as though that meant rocks and stones and minerals and was therefore hard and dry. It is true that Geology deals with rocks and stones and minerals, among other things, and sometimes it is hard and dry. But Arithmetic and Gram mar are sometimes hard and dry also. It may not always be the fault of the subject that it is uninteresting. The trouble may be in the way it is studied. When the author was a boy and sat upon a hard, old-fashioned wooden bench in a little country schoolhouse between the hills, in the state of New York, he used to think the reading lessons were pretty hard and dry. Since he has become older, however, he has come to think that the fault was not in the subject, for he now finds these same speeches of Webster and Clay and Washington, and selections from Irving and Lowell and Emerson, very interesting. The trouble seems to have been in the way he studied them. He did not see the beauty in them. He saw big words hard to pronounce and harder to spell, and punctuation marks, at which he must stop, put in between the words! When he read it was to pronounce the words and mind the pauses! The trouble was not with the lessons, for they were beautiful and grand. The trouble was not entirely with the boy, for he tried to do what he was told to do. Perhaps the fault was not altogether that of the teacher, for she did not know any better!