Anna Botsford Comstock, stated in her book "Handbook of Nature Study", "nature-study cultivates the child's imagination, since there are so many wonderful and true stories that he may read with his own eyes, which affect his imagination as much as does fairy lore, at the same time nature study cultivates in him a perception and a regard for what is true, and the power to express it...Nature study gives the child practical and helpful knowledge. It makes him familiar with nature's ways and forces, so that he is not so helpless in the presence of natural misfortune and disasters." Comstock also felt that the nature study did not begin with books, but through the observations of life and form from the first naturalists. The point of the system being to "give pupils an outlook over all the forms of life and their relation one to another".