NATURE STUDY by M. B. D.

Training-School Pub. Ass'n, Ltd. · Battle Creek, Michigan · Jan 1900

FromTraining School Advocate, The Advocate, Vol. 2, No. 1.

NATURE STUDY.

By M. B. D.

I HOPE that in the Nature Study department of the ADVOCATE, our teachers may find some words so pregnant with thought that the heart will rise in response to the Creator, who is ever directing our eyes to the beautiful in nature, and causing us to search anxiously for these revelations of his character. Wherever experiments are suggested, you will find it very helpful to try them, for children delight to see manifestations of divine love and law, and it will lead them to be more on the alert for the voice of God in trees, and stones, and flowers.

Never before have I so fully realized the wondrous beauty of the world in which we live, and as occasionally, when sitting alone with God, I picture to myself those angel teachers in the Eden school, I can almost hear the questions Adam and Eve asked as they saw and felt and heard the life of the Creator on all sides. Compared with any text-book ever written by man, the book of nature is as life compared with death. Encourage the children to ask questions. Encourage them to be still in order to hear the quiet voice that is ever speaking in the stones, in the drops of water, in the breezes which rush in at the open door, in the snowflakes which thickly cover the ground.

The following extracts are taken from the “Cyclopedia of Nature Teachings.”

M. B. D.

The Needle and Its Pole.

“The needle that has been touched with the loadstone may be shaken and agitated, but it never rests until it turns toward the pole” (Manton). Thus our hearts’ affections, when once magnetized by the love of Christ, find no rest except they turn to him. The cares and labors of the day may carry the thoughts to other objects, even as the finger may turn the needle to the east or west, but no sooner is the pressure removed than the thoughts fly to the Well-beloved just as the needle moves to its place. We are unable to rest anywhere but in Jesus.—C. H. Spurgeon.

Wearing the Stones.

Stones are charged with the worst species of hardness. “As stubborn as a stone,” it is said; and yet hardest stones submit to be smoothed and rounded under the soft friction of water. Ask the innumerable myriads of stones on the sea-shore, what has become of their little angles, once so stern and sharp, and of the roughness and uncouthness of their whole appearance. Their single reply is, “Water wrought with us, nothing but water, and none of us resisted.” Hear, then, the sermon of the pebbles:

“You are souls, and we are pebbles; water is water, and God is God; if we yield to be fashioned by water, and you do not yield to be fashioned by God, be not surprised that the very stones should cry out against you.”—John Pulsford.

Latent Light.

On one occasion, when Dr. Buckland, George Stephenson, and Sir William Follett were on a visit to Sir Robert Peel, the party had just returned from church, and were standing together on the terrace near the hall, when they observed in the distance a railway train flashing along, throwing behind it a long line of white steam.

“Now, Buckland,” said Mr. Stephenson, “I have a poser for you. Can you tell me what is the power that is driving that train?”

“Well,” said the doctor, “I suppose it is one of your big engines.”

“But what drives the engine?”

“Oh, very likely a canny Newcastle driver.”

“What do you say to the light of the sun?”

“How can that be?” asked the doctor.

“It is nothing else,” said the engineer; “it is light bottled up in the earth for years,—light absorbed by plants and vegetables being necessary for the condensation of carbon during the process of their growth, if it be not carbon in another form; and now, after being buried in the earth for long ages in fields of coal, that latent light is again brought forth, and liberated; made to work, as in that locomotive, for great human purposes.”

Like a flash of light, it illuminated in an instant an entire field of science.

At a meeting of the British Scientific Association, Sir D. Brewster exhibited a piece of chalcedony, within which a minute landscape could be seen. If kept in total darkness for four hours, this marvelous picture vanished, but reappeared as vivid as ever on ten minutes’ exposure to the sunlight, proving that not only could a design be mysteriously insinuated into the interior

of the mineral, but that the light could be stirred up therein, and produced at will. It was surmised that this effect had been produced by the action of nitrate of silver, salts of silver being, as all photographers know, very sensitive to the influence of light.

The Value of Darkness.

Isaac Taylor, writing on “A Dark Night,” argues on and illustrates the fact that one or two absolutely dark nights during the year are essentially necessary for the well-being of the vegetable and animal worlds. They provide times of absolute resting. It is very significant of the importance of darkness, that we can sleep in the dark; and that God arranged for about one third of our lives to be spent in the silence of darkness. There is evidently a natural connection between darkness and bodily and mental rest.

“A dark night, I mean a night really dark, which is not so frequent an occurrence, taking the year round, as you might suppose; speaking colloquially, a dark night, is not an every-day occurrence. Nights as absolutely lightless as some central cavern among the roots of the mountains may be, are not many in the round of the year. There may be two or three such nights occurring between October and February, or in some years there may not be even one such night. For producing a genuine dark night several atmospheric and meteorologic conditions must combine.

“Whence comes the peculiar darkness of this night, or how is it produced? And what is it for, or what are the purposes in the great economy of nature which it subserves?”

“The earth’s own temperature, not now radiated into the celestial spaces, is shut in—it is ovened, or muffled up; and this warmth is agreeably suffused throughout the space intervening between the earth and its cloudy envelope. A uniform vapory firmament constitutes the inferior stratum, which at once shuts in the warmth of the planets and shuts out the starry sky. Yet this one envelope by itself would leave us quite light enough to see the road, even to see the handpost, and enough, perhaps, to read the inscription thereon. There must be a second covering to create a dark-dark night. There must be a loftier firmament; there must be an unbroken expanse of cloud, between which and the lower stratum there will be a space of perhaps a mile in altitude, or two miles may intervene. It is this upper tier, it is this roofing high above the roof, it is this ample over-all, that, in the meteorological sense, gives us here below indeed a dark night.”

“This dark and silent night, is it in fact a dead time in nature? It is far otherwise. Everywhere it is a most busy hour, although the forces that are in action continue to perform their various offices in strictest silence. This is true of the vegetable, animal, and insect world.”