which you can use if you think best in making up your volume. Mrs. Kriege has translated and sent it to me for the meeting, which is postponed until Easter. I will also send the Baroness's own letter to me, though it is rather sad. She feels the immense difficulties of planting, amid the stereotyped conservatisms of Europe, this living germ, which requires the fresh-plowed unworn soil, and all the enlivening influences of the American nationality, in its pristine vigor, as is intimated by the flourishing growth at St. Louis and California, especially of the public Kindergartens there.

BRIEF NOTICE OF THE KINDERGARTEN IN AMERICA.

After your own articles on Fröbel in your Journal in 1856 and 1858, nothing was said in America till the review in the Christian Examiner, in 1859, Boston, of "Le Jardin des Enfunts." In the course of the next ten years some innocent, because ignorant, inadequate attempts were made at Kindergartens, but without such study into the practical details of the method as to do any justice to Fröbel's idea; and, on the whole, the premature attempt was unfortunate. The most noted one was my own in Boston; but I must do myself the justice to say that I discovered its radical deficiency, by seeing that the results promised by Fröbel, as the fruit of his method, did not accrue, but consequences that he deprecated, and which its financial success and the delight of the children and their parents in the pretty play-school did not beguile me into overlooking. Hence I went, in 1867, to Europe, to see the Kindergartens established and taught by Fröbel himself and his carefully educated pupils; and I returned in 1868, zealous to abolish my own and all similar mistakes, and establish the real thing, on the basis of an adequate training of the Kindergartners.

My plan was to create, by parlor lecturing in Boston, a demand that should result in our sending to Lubeck, Germany, for Fräulein Marie Boelté (now Mrs. Kraus-Boelté of New York) to come to Boston and establish a model Kindergarten and a training school for Kindergartners, inasmuch as she was one of the few ladies of position and high culture in Germany who, from purely disinterested motives, had become a Kindergartner. She had studied three years with Fröbel's widow in Hamburg, and went to England with Madame Rongé, and was her most efficient assistant, and had a high reputation there, where she had ac

quired the language in that perfection necessary to teach little children orally. I knew, from a distinguished relative of hers, that she would be willing to sacrifice everything-and it was a great deal she had to sacrifice-to come to America, because she knew that Fröbel had said that the spirit of the American nationality was the only one in the world with which his creative method was in complete harmony, and to which its legitimate institutions would present no barriers.

But when I came back to Boston, I found Madame Kriege and her daughter already there, and the enterprise had to contendwith an unprepared public, which had been also misled by my own unfortunately precipitate attempts, and others which had perhaps grown out of mine.

But something valuable was done by the intelligent and faithful labors of Mrs. Kriege and daughter during the next four years; and then Miss Boelté came to New York on invitation of Miss Haines of Gramercy Park, at the moment that Mrs. Kriege and her daughter returned to Europe for a vacation. A pupil of Madame Kriege, Miss Garland, who associated with herself a pupil of her own, Miss Weston, has carried on the Kindergarten training school of Boston with great fidelity. These two training schools are still doing the best work. Mrs. Kriege and daughter also returned to America in 1874, and as Miss Boelté married Mr. Kraus and became independent in her work, they took her place with Miss Haines for two years. There have also branched from Mrs. Kraus's school the work of Miss Blow, who has kept a free training school at St. Louis, since 1872, and is now inspector of the more than fifty free Kindergartens established by the municipality of that city; and a training school in Iowa by another of Mrs. Kraus's pupils. Mrs. John Ogden of Worthington, Ohio, is also a valuable trainer, a pupil of Miss Garland; also another, Miss Alice Chapin, in Indianapolis, Indiana, and another in connection with the Brooks school of Cleveland, Ohio. Of Mrs. Ogden's pupils, Miss Sara Eddy and Mrs. A. H. Putnam, both of Chicago, and Miss Burritt, known as "the Centennial Kindergartner of the Great Exhibition," and the Misses McIntosh of Montreal, P. Q., are at present training Kindergartners with success. Mrs. Van Kirk of Philadelphia, who studied three years with the best pupils of Miss Garland, practicing all the while in a Kindergarten of her own, in which one of them was principal, has also a training school in Philadelphia. One

of Miss Burritt's pupils has this year been appointed training teacher of a class of Kindergartners at the Baltimore Normal school, where she also keeps a model Kindergarten.

There are three other training schools kept by German ladiesMiss Anna Held, in Nashua, N. H., Miss Susie Pollock, in Washington, D. C., both of whom were graduates of a training school in Berlin, and Miss Marwedel, once having her training school in Washington, and now in Berkeley, California, a woman of brilliant genius, who has studied Fröbel's works by herself very profoundly, according to the testimony of Madame Kriege, and who proved her understanding of Fröbel by the beautiful results in her Kindergarten at Washington. A pupil of hers, Miss Graves, succeeded her in Washington when she left for California, and Miss Pollock and her mother have a training school there. There must be a good deal to choose with respect to these several trainers. Of those trained in Germany I can myself form no judgment, with the exception of Madame Kraus-Boelté, all of whose remarkable antecedents I know, and whose work, both here and in Europe, I know. She has the obvious advantage of having been more than twice as long at work as any other, and from spontaneous enthusiasm, and having had the nearest relations to Fröbel. Mrs. Kraus-Boelté always cries aloud and spares not in deprecation of recent students and not long experienced Kindergartners undertaking to train others, and has much and most true things to say of the profoundness of insight and depth of experience necessary in order to be sufficient to undertake the responsibilities of a Kindergartner, which are even greater than those of the Christian clergyman, because children are more utterly at the mercy of their Kindergartner than the adult at that of the clergyman. Mrs. Kraus would have the American Fröbel Union do something very emphatic to check those who, as she thinks, rush too rashly upon holy ground, where "angels fear to tread."

But no society has the power to take the place of conscience and reason, which are the only real guardians of the purity and efficiency of the Kindergartner's or of the clergyman's office. All that the American Fröbel Union can do is to provide a standard library of Kindergarten literature, and at its meetings, and by correspondence with Kindergartners' reunions and auxiliary societies, propagate the science and art of Fröbel, and do its best to keep the Kindergartners careful and studious, humble and diligently progressive; fitting themselves to live with the children.

genially and to their edification, by themselves becoming as little children, and living their own lives over again, religiously and morally, in the light of Fröbel's idea, and so becoming capable of character-forming and mind-building, by sincere study of nature, material, human and divine.

The Union was formed primarily to protect the name of Kindergarten from being confounded with methods of infant-training inconsistent with Fröbel's idea and system, and which was assumed, without sincerity, as a cover of quite another thing, which calls itself "the American Kindergarten," and claimed Fröbel's authority expressly for its own devices. The society has already done this work by giving a nation-wide impression that there is the difference of a genuine and a contrary thing, and awakening. care and inquiry in those who are seeking the most desirable education for their little children.

I must not omit to speak of one professor of Fröbel's art and science, whose works sufficiently praise him-I mean Mr. W. N. Hailman, author of an admirable little work called "Kindergarten Culture," also "Letters to Mothers," "Lectures to Kindergartners" (the two latter first published in "the New Education," which he edits, but now to be had in pamphlet form). This gentleman, who learnt the system in his native city of Zurich, has been engaged for ten years and more in this country in the German-American schools of Louisville, Milwaukee, and now in Detroit, and earned the money to enable his wife (American-born) to carry on a Kindergarten, as he is doing again now in Detroit, and also keeping with her a free training school for Kindergartners in that city. I do not know any one who has made such substantial sacrifices to the cause, or is doing more for it now.

And now a word upon the American Fröbel literature and I have done.

The first publication in America, except* some letters by Mr. John Kraus, in the Army and Navy Gazette and other newspapers, and my own letters in the New York Herald, of 1867-8, was the "Plea for Fröbel's Kindergarten as the Primary Art School," appended to the "Artisan and Artist Identified,"-an American re-publication of Cardinal Wiseman's lecture on "the Relations of the Arts of Design and the Arts of Production,"

*Earlier than either was a pamphlet issue of an article in the American Journal of Education for September, 1856, which by successive enlargements in 1858, 1861, and 1867, was continued on the List of Barnard's Educational Publications, and substantially embodied in the first edition of "German Pedagogy" in 1867.

Boston, 1869; the next was the article on

on the

Kindergarten Culture," in the Report of the Bureau of Education for 1870. I see you mean to re-publish these in your volume. I also republished, revised in 1869, the "Moral Culture of Infancy and Kindergarten Guide," by which I had misled the public, previous to my visit to Europe, in 1867; and in 1873, two lectures, one on the "Education of the Kindergartner," and one "Nursery," in which I state the grounds of Fröbel's authority. In that same year came out the "Résumé" of Mrs. Kriege's instructions to her training class, which she names "The Child in its threefold Nature as the Subject of the Kindergarten," and with most honorable intentions she called it a free rendering of the Baroness Marenholtz, which has unfortunately led many to suppose it was a translation of the Baroness's book on "the Being of a Child," which it is not, as she desires should be distinctly stated, that it may not preclude a possible English translation of that work.*

But in 1871, Milton Bradley, a toy manufacturer of Springfield, Mass., and a very intelligent man, became interested, by Mr. Edward Wiebe, in the Kindergarten idea, and under his advice, undertook the manufacture of Fröbel's materials, in the faith that there would presently be a remunerative demand for them. He also published a manual to show their use, which was largely a selection from Goldammer's German Guide, both as to plates and matter; to which Mr. Wiebe prefixed also an exact translation of the Baroness Marenholtz's introduction to that work (but without giving credit). The work was called “Paradise of Childhood," but was a different thing from Lina Morgenstern's German book of the same title. Within a year, Mr. Bradley has re-published the plates of this work, but with other letter-press of a superior character, credited to the Kindergartners of Florence, Massachusetts. I think Mr. Bradley himself was the author of the very valuable chapter on the manipulation of the scalene triangle. The chapters on the Second Gift and the Fifth Gift are better than those of any other manual that I have seen. In 1873, I began to edit the Kindergarten Messenger, and carried it through the years 1873-4-5 and 7, affording many able persons opportunity to express themselves. There is one article which I have twice printed and which I wish you would re-print

*Such a translation has been made by Miss Alice M. Christie, (London: W. Swan Sonneschein, 15 Paternoster Square, 1879,) and will be republished in the Kindergarten Papers.