PREFACE
This text has been prepared for the purpose of furnishing the pupil with the essential facts about tools and their uses. However efficient the instruction may be and however attentive the pupil, it is impossible for him to fully grasp and comprehend during a demonstration the names of tools and technical terms, most of which are new to him. This applies with equal force to the manner of using the tools and to the methods of working.
The function of the text is to supplement the instruction of the teacher. It is intended to gather up and arrange in a logical order the facts which the pupil has already been told. By this means these facts will become fixed in the mind of the pupil and he will work with a better understanding and make greater progress.
It is believed that the text can be used to the greatest advantage by requiring the pupil to read up the subjects presented in class immediately after the close of the lesson. Frequent rapid reviews and occasional written tests are very effective.
No course of study in the form of a series of models is presented. It is hardly possible for any two schools to follow the same series of models. Local conditions necessarily affect the choice of a course, while new and better designs are being brought out continuously.
The order in which the tools are described in the following pages is the one that has seemed most natural. They may be taken up, however, in any convenient and logical order.
It is with the earnest hope that nature study and manual work may be closely correlated, that Part II is added. No better period can be selected in which to study trees, their leaves, bark, wood, etc., than when the student is working with wood, learning by experience its grain, hardness, color, and value in the arts.
Occasional talks on the broader topics of forestry, its economic aspects, climatic effects, influence on rainfall, the flow of rivers, floods, droughts, etc., will be found interesting as well as instructive, and such interest should be instilled into every American boy and girl.
The writer is indebted to the Fish, Forest, and Game Commission of New York state for the series of Adirondack lumbering scenes, and to the United States Bureau of Forestry for the views of California Big Trees.
EDWIN W. FOSTER.