The chemical terminology, notations and equations cannot be taught ex professo; but used experimentally in the upper classes, they become familiar by degrees.

Physics is a science which permits the incessant application of the fertile principle of action in aid of the numerous experiments which the pupils can imagine and perform themselves. Mechanics is also very valuable in this point of view. The notions of force and motion may be inculcated by the observation of moving bodies; the study of simple machines makes the pupils ingenious, and a powerful argument for culture can be drawn from them by inciting the pupils to construct little mechanical objects and resolve certain problems, not by the aid of figures, but by means of apparatus.

Geometric Forms and Construction.

Fröbel made geometry one of the pivots of his system. It is indeed a science which teaches rectitude of mind and the process of reasoning. It prepares the child to conceive of abstraction without which science is impossible. It must be presented in the primary school under the concrete and intuitive form, by the aid of material figures and graphic constructions. At first the child learns to distinguish the different solids, to name them, to make them of paper, of wire, or of clay. These exercises give skill to the fingers, justness to the eye, and furnish fundamental notions of geometric terms which it is impossible to make understood by beginning with definitions. In the kindergarten, large use is made of these exercises, which the primary school should resume and complete. Most of the properties of objects are made intuitive by easy and gradual constructions. This is a vast field to be exploited.

Arithmetic-Drawing.

Arithmetic must be attached to geometry. The science of numbers is difficult only when taken in its purely abstract character, which makes it inaccessible to the minds of children. By applying it to geometry it is rendered concrete, and becomes a powerful means of intellectual development. It is the same with the metric system, which gives no useful and persistent result if confined to definitions and numerical applications. It is by making learners measure with a veritable meter, teaching them to manipulate the weights and measures, to construct square or cubic measure, to appreciate at sight the extent of bodies, that these important notions are engraved upon the mind.

Drawing is one of the most efficacious means of rendering the teaching of the sciences intuitive. Children have a special liking for drawing. This natural disposition should be taken advantage of to make them represent largely the objects studied in their different lessons. We do not speak here of æsthetic drawing, but only of very simple graphic constructions. The apparatus for teaching physics and chemistry, the machines and utensils which have been analyzed, the geometric figures which have been studied, form good subjects for

drawing. Sometimes let the child draw from objects, which habituates his eye to observe proportions; sometimes let him draw them from memory, which is a much more intense intellectual labor, and one desirable for frequent use.

Thus we see all the sciences are an inexhaustible mine of exercise, of observation for the development of the creative faculties.

When we pass in review the whole series of the sciences of observation, we are struck with the immense number of notions they contain. We are apt to think there will not be time enough to teach them in the primary school,* where writing and reading take a large place. This is a misapprehension. The important thing is not to make the children go to the bottom of all these sciences, to form physicists, chemists, geometricians of them. The accumulation of notions is an evil, for the mind can, no more than the stomach, assimilate food taken in too large quantities. It is necessary to make a choice from this mass of knowledge upon all points, to take the most important, that to which the principle of intuition can best apply. The instructor must not be anxious to teach too many things to his pupils. The important thing is to develop the faculties, and the scientific elements are the only means adapted to this culture. To form a sound judgment should be the constant aim of the efforts of the professor. He must watch with especial care not to fatigue the brain. The prodigies of ten years old are always badly balanced, and become mediocre beings. It is better, as Montaigne said, "to have the head well made than too full."

Objections to Intuitive Teaching Considered.

Intuitive teaching has often been reproached with being dry, arid, tedious; with not developing the imagination or the literary aptitudes; with suppressing the idea of pains-taking and effort, making study a kind of play; destroying religious faith, the belief in the supernatural, giving the child the habit of scientific research which leads him to positivism and materialism.

Intuitive teaching is not dry, arid, tedious, except when given under the form of object lessons in which the attention of the child is only drawn to objects with which he is perfectly acquainted, of which he has long had the intuition, and when things of all kinds are spoken of which he has not seen and which are not shown to him. Thus, a penknife is given to a pupil, and he is told that it consists of a handle and one or two blades, then the making of steel is explained, the elephant that furnished the ivory handle is mentioned, Africa and India, which that pachyderm inhabits, negroes, slavery, etc. Nothing can be less intuitive, so ordinary and so uninteresting as such exercises, which neither teach how to observe nor how to judge, or even how to talk.

Influence on Imagination and Style.

Far from cooling off the imagination, the true intuitive study of the sciences by observation develops it far better than exclusively literary *In Belgium and France the primary school keeps the pupils till they are fourteen.

studies. The latter produce superficial minds, pre-occupied alone with form, which are in the habit of looking only at the phrase, and remain inattentive to the reality behind it. In no language is there any literary work that can act as powerfully upon the imagination as nature when observed with an attentive and intelligent eye. There is more true poetry in astronomy than in Racine or Boileau. The spectacle of the starry heavens opens to thought vaster horizons and fills the soul with an enthusiasm far greater than that elicited by the reading of an epic poem. What writer ever imagined a variety of colors, forms. and manifestations of all kinds to be compared with that presented by animals and plants? What are the metamorphoses of Ovid, the tales of Perrault by the side of the wonderful phenomena revealed by the life of the silk-worm, the bee, the ant, the lowest animals and the most common plants?

It is not true that intuitive teaching is unfavorable to literary culture. It is, on the contrary, the essential condition of a rational literary culture. It furnishes words and the thoughts they represent from the very earliest age. It teaches to enunciate with clearness and simplicity the thoughts which have been spontaneously formed in the mind. It is true that it repudiates those rules of style which consist in amplifying a dictated summary, in describing things which have not been observed, and in recounting feelings which the child has not felt. But these exercises do not teach to express thoughts in writing, and accustom their victims to be satisfied with mere words.

There is reason in saying that the study of great writers is excellent for literary culture; but intuitive teaching does not exclude it; it prepares the mind to undertake it successfully. It is wrong to begin to explain authors too soon. How do we suppose a primary school pupil can reap any benefit from reading: Animals sick with the pestilence, a scene from Tartuffe, the Imprecations of Camillus, a Funeral Oration by Bossuet, an Epistle of Boileau, when we dare not pretend that a child of twelve years of age possesses enough experience of life, enough ideas and judgment, to seize upon the true meaning of those works, which were written for the instruction or amusement of men, and not for the education of children in a primary school? Lamartine, in his Voyage en Orient, makes a very just reflection àpropos to this: "Every wave," he says, 66 urges me towards Greece; I touch it.. Its appearance moves me profoundly, much less however than if all these memories had not withered in my heart by having been amassed in my memory before my thought understood them. Greece is to me like a book whose beauties are tarnished because we were made to read it before we had the power to comprehend it. I prefer a tree, a fountain under a rock, a laurel rose on the border of a river, under the crumbled archway of a bridge tapestried with vines, to the monument of one of those classic kingdoms which recall nothing to my mind but the ennui they gave me in my childhood."

But how can we form the style by intuitive teaching? it will be asked. Shall we only require of the pupil to describe the things he has seen and the feelings he really felt?

And why should we seek for other subjects? Do we teach style by imitated composition and verbiage?

We highly appreciate the originality of writers who are imposing by their talent or their genius, and we would make the pupils in the primary and secondary schools make imitations and amplifications which can have no other effect than to prevent that precious quality from developing! Has not Boileau, that master in the art of writing, said, "Before writing, learn to think"; "what is well conceived is clearly spoken, and the words come easily to tell it."

Intuitive teaching, which teaches how to think and produces conception before description, is what must be preferred even as preparation for literary studies.

Intuitive Teaching makes School attractive.

Shall we speak of the reproach cast upon intuitive teaching because it banishes pain, labor and effort by transforming studies into a species of joy? Is the school then supposed to be a gloomy place where little children are condemned to painful, wearisome labors? Is it not better to make them feel that work is not a punishment, and that the ideal, which is the sovereign good, is not repose but useful activity? Intuitive teaching abolishes the sterile efforts which these pupils must make to whom things are spoken of, of which they have not the least idea and which they do not see, but replaces them by that fertilizing effort of the mind which seizes with avidity the notions presented to it in an attractive form. By rendering the earliest studies painful, we rebuff the children and disgust them with study. This is why the school, so badly organized, has need of punishments and rewards as a provocative of labor, while the kindergarten and the school in which the teaching is intuitive do very well without those factitious means of emulation and repression.

Intuitive Teaching not Irreligious, nor Immoral.

Intuitive teaching has been accused of being opposed to morality, and of leading to materialism by the habit it gives the mind to admit only what has been proved, to observe only what is tangible.

In certain places the development of the natural sciences and their introduction into the programmes of primary instruction are bitterly combatted, because they are accused of being irreligious. Herbert Spencer has perfectly answered this objection. "Far from science being irreligious," he says, "it is the abandonment of science that is irreligious. Let us make an humble comparison. Let us suppose an author whom we should salute every day with praises expressed in pompous style. Let us suppose that the wisdom, grandeur and beauty of his works are the constant subject of the praises addressed to him. Let us suppose that those who praise his works have never seen even

the cover of them, have never read them, never even tried to comprehend them; of what value would their praises be? And yet, if we may be permitted to compare small things with great, let us see how humanity has generally conducted itself toward the universe and its great cause. It is not science, then, but indifference to science, that is irreligious."

Intuitive teaching can only be considered immoral by those who look upon morality as a mass of traditional prescriptions to be inculcated upon children by the aid of formulas which they are taught to learn by heart. It is thought that moral culture, which is the essential part of general education, consists in preaching sermons and saying catechisms."

The field for the culture of morality is consequently the family and the schools. It is obtained by observing a discipline that is conformable to nature. By developing good feelings inculcated early, by inspiring sincerity, by forming upright hearts and characters, by showing that in all circumstances labor is the law of humanity, by transforming the school into a little society in which reign truth and justice, we form moral beings much more easily than by telling them stories called moral stories, and by discourses upon virtue and vice.

"The intuition of morality," says M. Guilliaume, "is the knowledge of duty. Now duty is not the result of theories, It is derived as little from ethics as digestion is derived from physiology. Theory, true or false, plays but a subaltern part in it. It exercises control for the acquiescence of the intellect over the will already fixed without it. But the practice of duty which is the result of action that has become habit, alone has importance for the ends of education."

In our

Faith in the supernatural has been in all times the greatest obstacle to social progress. The school of the people was not made to preserve the chains which have so long interfered with the blossoming out of the human intellect. A powerful scientific current bears us along. Free examination is the characteristic of modern civilization. society man has no longer to expect anything but from himself, from his own will, his own energy, his own intelligence. If we wish to preserve the conquests that are dear to us and constitute our glory, we must conform our system of education to the principles which rule modern society. Authoritative teaching, dogmatic, narrow and full of errors, prejudices and falsehoods, bequeathed to us by the scholasticism of the middle ages is to give place to intuitive teaching which develops the child in the integrity of his faculties and will prepare generations of intelligent, moral and free men.