Elementary Agriculture and Nature Study

Toronto: Educational Book Co, 1909. First Edition. Octavo in rustic blind-stamped original green cloth boards; 298 pages illustrations Very good+ to near fine(-); tight and clean with very slight edge-wear. Personal owner name to front paste-down. Hardcover.

Uncommon. "John Brittain (1849–1913) was a New Brunswick science teacher and naturalist who became one of the leading Canadian advocates of "nature study" as a school subject. For many years an instructor at the Provincial Normal School in Fredericton, he was an active member of the Natural History Society of New Brunswick, contributing field papers to its Bulletin such as "Notes on the summer birds of the Restigouche valley, New Brunswick" (1889, with Philip Cox). When Sir William Macdonald and James W. Robertson founded Macdonald College at Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue, Quebec, in 1907 as a centre for agricultural, household-science and teacher education, Brittain was appointed its Professor of Nature Study. His principal work, Elementary Agriculture and Nature Study (Toronto: Educational Book Co., 1909), prefaced by Robertson and with supplementary chapters by Carleton J. Lynde, W. W. Hubbard and D. Wiley Hamilton, became a standard text for Canadian rural teachers and reflects the Macdonald movement's conviction that observation of the living world should sit at the centre of elementary schooling Nature study." Agriculture Agriculture. Nature -- Étude et enseignement. farming (activity or system) Agriculture. Nature study.