The Hawaiian star. [volume] (Honolulu [Oahu]) 1893-1912, 1911-08-05
Advantages Of Nature Study

gall flies with their brilliant metallic
coloring, of how in the clover leaves
of almost any lawn miners are at
work making wonderful serpentine
mines, how in the muck of the pond
the dragon fly larvae live with the
wonderful extension jaw, almost like
a miniature alligator, of watching the
ugly, repulsive big green tomato worm
build his house of brown and next
spring to see the big brilliant colored
moth that comes out where the green
worm went in, of hunting along back
yard fences for butterfly chrysalis and
the leaves where are the quaint eggs
Of the aphis-lion, each daintily poised
on a hair to save it from it's cannibal-
istic brothers, to learn the delicate
May fly whose life of generally not
much over a day as a fly has been so
often sung about by the poets, to find
in the sand reaches along the Ameri-
can the brilliant green cuckoo fly with
its shocking morals and its way OF
protecting itself with it's metallic ar
NOR from the attacks of the righteous
ly indignant wasps, of learning how
while men dream of the beauties of
socialistic Utopia, the bees and the
ants already have theirs, to find in the
American river willows giant greer
beetles and great yellow spiders which
look like those from the tropics which
we see in museums but which find life
possible in our rainless California
summers, to watch in the flowers o
the back yard garden the crab spider
that build no webs, but who have as
sumed the yellows and whites of tn
flowers where they crawl and hide an,
seize the insect that comes for tn
, flowers honey, to study how beetle
and moths have like the birds of tn
field taken on the color of their SUI
rounding and so are often unseer
while the soldiers Of our country wor
| in battle the prominent blue whic
/ made them marks for the enemy's bu
r let's, lesson which England in all he
( wisdom did not learn until the Boo
war was half over and her redcoat
| were picked off by the krag-Jorger
: sens in the hands of the bearde
], Dutchmen, whose clothes were tn
? color of the dust of the veldt whic
, the Britons did not win until aftel
1 ward when in their khaki they coul
: well say in Kiplings lines:
We've sailed it down with our bones
poor beggars; it's blue with on
bones).
t All these things, the knowledge
e which is the natural heritage of til
d country lad and lassie are a close
a book to the average city boy. Tho'
= of us who in the summer hours
$ yesterday hunted for butterflies al
h beetles where apartment houses ar
e skyscrapers now stand on Sacr
ul6uIO 5IlSSCS heiu q CooIC VI ~ u
# boy and girl of today has to be taugl
It how to find these things. Every OF
l. of the fascinating things above me
d toned and a thousand more can
n found by the city boy within the eli
i limits or within the reach of a 5-cel
a. car fare. The big educators of Il
a East are using it as a preventati'
e measure, realizing that the city pop
d lation is almost balancing the rur
h and that when the scales turn Anne
n can institutions must be sorely trie
,'' for it is in the cities we have mat
Is the only American government ia
IL ures, and the history of our legisl
1t lures show that when measures a
'e introduced for betterment the me
Of whose votes are for progress are Il
ID men from the small towns and Il