Book excerpt: Excerpt from Complete Farmer's Guide: Fundamentals of Farming and Farm Life While there have been great strides in recent years in the development of text-books on elementary agriculture, the best texts are still unsatisfactory in many ways. The defects complained of arise largely out of the fact that these texts are usually prepared by busy scientists who, though they may know agriculture, have made little study of the mental processes of children, have had little or no experience in teaching children, and are not very familiar with the exact conditions in the schools in which the texts are to be used. The result is that the subject-matter has not always been wisely chosen in the light of children's natural interests and needs, nor has the subject-matter that was chosen been organized in a careful, pedagogical manner, by starting always with the known, leading to the unknown through the known, and making the study a closely knit, coherent, living whole. Indeed, several of the texts are mere collections of articles on a dozen or more varied topics written by specialists in different institutions and without any common plan of organization or method of presentation. The children are not introduced gradually to the new technical terms, nor are proper apperceptive bases first laid before attempting to present the more complex processes of plant or animal growth. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.