From the Parents' Review: on children's collections

(posted by Anne White)

"As for the educational value of juvenile collecting, there are many sorts of collections which are instructive and quite harmless, which depend on contributions gathered by the children themselves, not bought in shops: shells, pebbles, twigs, seeds, mosses, and best of all, paintings of flowers. It is as easy to make a child look out in the map the country whence comes a plant, the flower of which he has painted, as it is to make him look for the town where a stamp was issued. The secretary of the Bayswater Branch of the P.N.E.U., in inviting children to send Natural History collections for the annual exhibition, expressed a wish that shells, seeds, etc., should be sent in boxes not bought, but made by the children."

("The Stamp Traffic As a Factor in Education." Letter to the Parents' Review by Mary Everest Boole, Volume 10, 1899, pg. 214.)