IT is of advantage to know why a given occupation is profitable, why it is attractive or otherwise, to what sort of minds it is best adapted, and how it should be conducted to yield the best returns.

Other things being equal, the mind acts most healthfully on what is most pleasing. Children are attracted most by things having life, character, color, and rarity. Whatever has life appeals directly to the young mind, especially where the various stages of life are apparent. Birth, infancy, the family relation, society, paternity, sickness, death, joy, sadness, homes, building of nests, eggs, incubation, flying, singing, fighting, foraging, searching covert places, digging, boring, hammering, wading, swimming, catching, devouring, sentry duty, migration, gregariousness, dress, differences in appearance of sexes and ages, moulting, mimicking, special equipment for occupations, anatomy, physiology, hygiene, usefulness to man, assistance in agriculture and arboriculture, destructiveness to noxious life, swiftness, deliberation, expertness, stupidity, instincts for remarkable performances, lack of judgment in certain lines, loquacity, vivacity, sympathy and mutual helpfulness, resemblances to humanity and differences, and apparent moral sensibility, are among the leading features of birds in general which make them attractive to the youthful mind.

Where any of these subjects may be utilized in the ordinary instruction of children the results are more permanent and direct than where the same sort of instruction has been attempted with material that appeals less strenuously to the soul of the learner. That which arouses the most intense activity makes the most lasting impression. Even where the impression is a painful one the result endures; as in old England the memory of landmarks was impressed upon young boys by showing and flogging the boys at once. The unreasoning pain and the sight of the landmark remained forever associated. Modern research has found that pleasant sensation opens the mind and that attention is easily concentrated where inclination also leads. Whatever is discovered by the pupil while thoroughly aroused is of most lasting value. The ideas which school men have for centuries been trying to beat into the minds of children by senseless and dull repetition have been found to be easy of acquisition and in many instances matters almost of intuition if they may first be brought into the consciousness in a natural manner.

The instructor who has not the time nor the tact and invention needed to open the minds of his pupils first and then arrange matters so that self-directed activity will follow, will have a great deal of hard work before him if he hopes to compete with those who have found the secret of the mind's growth and act upon it intelligently. Such teaching cannot produce the results which are now being acquired in our best schools.

A whole system of education could be arranged with bird life as material for arousing and fixing the interest of the learner. But this is not our purpose. A whole system should take in all of the universe that is capable of interesting the learner. Our purpose is to take the most intensely absorbing field and show how it may be tilled. Birds are used because so much more and better activity is to be secured by using them as the material for school work than from any other.

Why birds are so commanding to the growing mind will become clear to one who will patiently follow the thought in the remainder of this article. In avoiding technical terms the statement has been weakened, but it is believed that those who would enjoy the reading better if the terms were technical and closely accurate do not need to have the matter stated to them at all. Hence the statement is made in the terms of common speech with the object in mind of giving the reasons to those not much accustomed to the terms used by writers on psychological topics.

The mind is somewhat like the eye. It takes in whatever is before it. It is never concentrated upon one object alone, but has to occupy itself to some extent with the surroundings of the object. It is impossible to fix the mind, or the attention, exclusively upon one thing. We frequently ask our pupils to do this, but it is impossible. The mind at any one instant resembles the surface of a wave of water, part of what it carries is low, another part higher, and some other things are highest. But few things can be at or near the crest at once. Many things are around the base. As with the eye a few objects are at or near the focus, many things are where they are sensed but are not in the supreme position. And as the wave of water runs along its course so the mind moves forward. It will either run directly away from the subject or it will turn the subject over and carry it along in continually changing aspects. The mind cannot stand still. It cannot keep anything more than an instant except by turning the thing about and perceiving it in relation to other things. We still consider we have the thing in mind after we have ceased to think of it as a whole and pass on to thinking of its relations to other things.

The mind differs from the wave of water in that it is not extensive to the right and left of its course. It is like a hill with a small crest that can hold but few objects upon its surface. When we say we are thinking profoundly upon a subject we mean that that subject and its connections are continuously upon the crest of the wave, and that unrelated things are either not in the mind at all or they are at least not at the focus.

The things that are in the mind but not focal are continually striving, as if they were alive and very active to get at the focal point. Just as the eye is continually tempted to wander, making one object after another its focal one, so the mind is bound to travel unless it has been trained to turn from the thing to its relations and related things and from them back to the main thing again. That is the only way to pay attention. You cannot pay attention to one physical thing for more than an instant. But you can hold a chain of connected things running through the mind, but the things are continually modified by their relations and the absolutely same thing is never again in the mind. When it appears again it is clothed upon or enlarged or modified by what the mind has discovered about it and its relations or has invented and attached to it.

It is easy to repeat the multiplication table without having it focal in the mind. You may read half a page of print with your focal point upon some other matter. You may pray and find in your mind at the same moment a wicked thought. Worse than this, you may continue your prayer and the wicked thought may become focal. Not by your desire that it shall be so, but by the power of marginal things in the mind which makes them focal without your apparent anticipation or desire to have them at the focus. You cannot say that the multiplication table is not in the mind when you are repeating it and wondering who will be at the party this evening. It is there but not focal. When you are reading the words of the page the words may be in your mind, but the focal point may be occupied at the time by wondering how the baby learned to climb so young and guessing whether you ought to catch her or run the risk of her falling, and if she should fall how much she would be injured, what the people would think of you for sitting there and letting her fall, why babies have to fall so much, whether they really learn much about slipping or center of gravity by falls so early in life, and a thousand other items in child study. But the reading is in your mind much as it used to be when your teacher said to you, "Now I want to see you keep your eyes on your book for fifteen minutes without looking off."

The mind grows at first by use of the senses. The sight is the main instrument of youthful mental growth. Things which can be seen or visually remembered are most appropriate subjects for juvenile thinking. You cannot well converse with children upon the pleasures of hope, the uses of adversity, nor any of the forms of mind stuff that are called abstractions. True, they like to play upon words and commit them to memory so as to reproduce them. But this is not because of the real meaning of the words committed but because the ear is pleased. Children enjoy talking like adults as well as looking and acting like them in their unstudied masquerades.

The proper material for juvenile mind action is what may be acquired by the senses. All those subjects in the second paragraph of this article are mainly appeals to the senses. These readily become focal in any mind, but chiefly in the mind that has never been trained away from the senses by abstract thinking. No child can pay attention to anything else when a bird flies in at the window. The bird and its act, its motive, its fellows, its appearance, its nest, its young, and a thousand other notions rush to the focus of his mind, no matter how diligently he may strive to keep them down. Instead of repressing in the mind what is naturally inclined to become focal, education is now finding out the value of permitting these things to come naturally into the mind and so operating upon them that mental growth ensues with little or no friction, and without asking the learner to flagellate himself continually that he may have knowledge to use in that distant and half-believed-in time when he shall be a man.

Everyone knows that children are delighted with colored pictures. But there is an intensity of delight aroused by a certain class of colored pictures which has been a matter of surprise to most educators and parents since color photography has become practical for illustration. Infants in arms, who have never seen any birds except a few of the size of a canary, are so fascinated with the bird charts that psychologists have found a new problem presented.

If we look upon the child as he views an accurate colored picture we note that he is affected just the same as if the bird itself were before him. His imagination carries him beyond the picture to the thing itself, even in the instances where he has never seen the bird nor any like it. As to his mental state, we can say that the bird rises directly to the focal point in his mind, and it is not the bird picture that holds him but the bird itself. For teaching purposes this is peculiarly fortunate, for the child is ready to grasp any suggestion from the teacher in order to enjoy the bird more at length. All the subjects of school work will ordinarily appeal to the child, rising readily into the focus of attention where the bird, its relations, its acts, and things pertaining to it, become the material for school activity.

This liveliness and readiness are not so manifest where mounted specimens are used, because the element of death becomes focal at the first instant, is displaced with difficulty, and continually recurs with sickening frequency during the exercise. The acts associated with the capture and death of the bird are too dangerously strong to be avoided. They should by no means be suggested.

Mr. Aima B. Morton puts it in this way: Why do children like colored pictures to abstraction? Because the child is father to the man. And what do we love more than tone and color, music and pictures? It is an inherent quality, the soul of life leading us back to nature, the All-mother. We have hung up pictures and maps of a poor quality before the class for years, and then lectured away at them ad infinitum and ad nauseam, thinking, because we understood, that the child also understood. But this is not so. We nearly always suppose too much, especially in lower grades.

Diesterweg said: "If you speak about a calf in the school room, bring it in and show it." This principle is still true to-day. All things in nature, as far as possible, should be present in propria persona. Where not possible, we must try to approach that ideal by bringing the very best, and natural pictures of the objects, that is colored ones, and the vivid imagination of the child does the rest. It does not see the picture, the object itself is there, nature has entered the school room.

So we learn that bird study, aided by color photographs, is psychologically the most valuable means to the attainment of school ends. It is attractive to the young mind because it furnishes material which rises most readily to the focal point in the mind. It relieves teacher and pupil of the strain attendant upon work where it is difficult to get the class to "pay attention." It is chiefly adapted to growing minds. No matter how strongly the matured mind with its powers of abstract thinking may be drawn toward it, it is yet more attractive to the mind that has not been trained to any sort of restraint. To get the best results, bird study should not be conducted with a view to storing the child's mind with scientific knowledge, nor for the sole purpose of employing it effectively to teach language and other branches of school effort. But it should be pursued as a mode of activity which develops mind, acknowledging the fortunate circumstance that school learning and bird knowledge will both be acquired at the same time, although they are not the direct objects of the pursuit.