Old School

Well, it's happened again. I walked into a furniture and home accessories store looking for a sofa and chairs (we have none in the living room just now) and walked out with two of the old books I found decorating a display. One is First Year Science, by William H. Snyder, Sc.D., principal of The Hollywood High School, Los Angeles, copyright 1914. I'd like to share the first few paragraphs from the preface and some excerpts from later pages that I found particularly interesting:

PREFACE

    First Year Science deals with the earth and the sun in their relations to man. This treatment has three advantages: it gives the book unity; it gives practical interest; and it offers all the earth science needed to meet such requirements as those of the College Entrance Examination Board.
   This book is meant for immature students. For this reason the language is simple, not
technical, and the principles are thoroughly illustrated by experiments and pictures. A treatment too terse and condensed tends to confuse young students; hence the topics in First Year Science are sufficiently discussed to enable young pupils to master them with ease.
   All subjects of elementary school science—physics, chemistry, meteorology, botany, zoology, physiology, astronomy, physiography, forestry, and agriculture—are treated, so that the pupil can find out for himself which ones he wishes to study later in the course. ...

Necessary Foods

    Until recently, it was thought that a great deal of meat was necessary to furnish the energy needed for hard muscular work. But now investigation has shown that this energy can better be supplied by other foods and that eating too much meat is not only needlessly expensive but bad for the system. ...

Forestry

   In recent years the demand for lumber and wood pulp and the careless and wasteful way in which the forests have been handled by the lumbermen has greatly reduced the forests of the United States. It has been authoritatively stated that if the present waste of our forest land continues, the timber supply of the country will be exhausted before 1940. ...
   Because of the wide range of climate and the variety of physical conditions, there are a great many different kinds of plants and animals in the United States, but the wild animals have been steadily killed off as man has needed their haunts for his farms and dwellings.