ive struggle towards self-consciousness, and by wisely organized material to stimulate and direct creative activity.

However we may criticise the basis of Fröbel's thought, no fair observer will question the results of his method. Let a child try to fashion his lump of clay into a bird's nest, and though his effort yield no other result it will certainly lead him to examine carefully the next bird's nest he sees. Let him make an apple and a pear and he must feel their difference in form as he would never have done had he simply looked at the two fruits. Let him attempt to lay with his sticks the outline of a house and his attention cannot fail to be caught by facts of direction and proportion. Let him apply numbers in weaving and their relations grow interesting to him. Lead him to construct symmetrical figures and he must feel the laws of symmetry. Teach him rhythmic movements and he must recognize rhythm. All things are revealed in the doing, and productive activity both enlightens and develops the mind.

It has always been a difficult problem to strike the balance between knowledge and power. The mind is not a sponge, nor is education the absorption of facts. On the other hand nothing is more dangerous than energy uncontrolled by knowledge and insight. The mind like the stomach suffers from overloading, yet both need constant food. The test of healthy assimilation is increasing strength, and we know we are supplying the mind with the right kind and amount of food if we notice a gain in vigor and originality. The child's intense play is nature's effort to order the thronging impressions of the first years of life, and the Kindergarten simply follows nature in alternating receptive and creative activities, and in constantly registering the results of perception in reproduction.

In an age so analytical and scientific as our own the Kindergarten has a special value. Scientific methods need to be supplemented in education by artistic processes. The scientist beginning with the embodied fact seeks its relations and its causes,-the thought of the artist is the final cause of the statue, the painting or the poem. The scientist, "handicapped by fact and riveted to matter," struggles painfully towards the spiritual, while before the artist the invisible is constantly shaping the visible and the eternal declaring itself in the transitory. The restless scientist strives to order a bewildering variety, the artist instinctively realizes the unity from which variety is evolved and feels the soul of the whole animating each particular part. We prepare the children for spiritual insight when we lead them to create.

Again, the representative system is death to superficiality and selfconceit. The child's imperfect results teach him humility and stir him to fresh effort. He is constantly testing his perceptions by production, and measuring himself by his attainment. He learns that what he can use is his, that only what he consciously holds he truly possesses. He finds out in what directions he can best work and transforms un

comprehended tendency into definite character. He advances on the one hand from perception to conception, from conception to reproduction, from reproduction to definition, and on the other from an instinctive to a self-directing activity, and from this to self-knowledge and self-control. Thus by the same process he unlocks creation and realizes in himself the image of his Creator.

The order of the Kindergarten gifts follows the order of mental evolution, and at each stage of the child's growth Fröbel presents him with his "objective counterpart." "The child," he says, "develops like all things, according to laws as simple as they are imperative. Of these the simplest and most imperative is that force existing must exert itself,-exerting itself it grows strong-strengthening it unfolds-unfolding it represents and creates-representing and creating it lifts itself to consciousness and culminates in insight." This perception of the course of development determines his idea of the stages of early education. It should aim, first, to strengthen the senses and muscles conceived as the tools of the spirit,-second, to prepare for work by technical training, and to aid self-expression by supplying objects which through their indefiniteness may be made widely representative,—third, to provide material adapted to the conscious production of definite things and diminish the suggestiveness of this material in direct ratio to the increase of creative power, and fourth, by analysis of the objects produced, and the method of their production lift the child to conscious communion with his own thought. The first stage of this educational process is realized through the "Songs for Mother and Child,"-the second through the Kindergarten games, the simpler occupations and the first two Gifts,-the third through the exercises with blocks, tablets, slats, sticks and rings, and the work in drawing, folding, cutting, peas work and modeling, and the fourth through the wise appeal of the Kindergartner to the thought of the child as she leads him slowly from the what to the how, and from the how to the why and wherefore of his own action.

The definitely productive exercises begin with the Third Gift. Fröbel contends that the proverbial destructiveness of children is a perversion of the faculties of investigation and construction, and that the broken toys strewn over our nursery floors express the mind's impatient protest against finished and complicated things. Unable to rest in externals the child breaks his toys to find out "what is inside," and scorn. ful of what makes no appeal to his activity he turns from the most elegant playthings to the crude results of his own manufacture. What he wants is not something made for him, but material to make something himself. What he needs is an object which he can take to pieces without destroying, and through which he can gratify his instinct to transform and to reconstruct. At the same time the possibilities of the object must not be too varied and it must be suggestive through its limitations. The young mind may be as easily crushed by excess as it,

is paralyzed by defect. Hence, Fröbel's choice of a cube divided into eight smaller cubes. It is easily separated into its elements and easily reconstructed. It is capable of a reasonable number of transformations, and its crude resemblances satisfy the child's crude thought. It offers no variety of form to confuse his mind, but rigidly confines him to vertical and horizontal, to the right angle and the square. Moreover, he can scarcely arrange his blocks in any way without their taking forms which will suggest some object he has seen. If he piles them one above the other a word from mother or Kindergartner enables him to see in the unsought result of his doing a tower, a light-house or a lamp post. If he arranges them side by side he is confronted with a wall, if in two parallel rows, behold the railroad! The change of a single block transforms the railroad into a train of cars, and with another movement the cars vanish in a house. Having as it were reached these results accidentally the child next directly aims to reproduce them, and thus through the suggestiveness of his material is helped from an instinctive to a self-directing activity, and from simple energy to definite production. This point once attained he triumphs over more and more complicated material, and constrains an ever increasing variety of elements to obey his thought. With planes and sticks he advances to surface representation, and prepares the way for drawing, and finally begins of himself to form letters and to spell out the names of familiar things. His progress, like that of the race, moves thus from the concrete to the abstract, from the fact to the picture, and from the picture to the sign.

In the exercises with the Gifts, great care is necessary on the part of the Kindergartner. She must see that each gift is conceived first as a whole, complete in itself, and must derive its parts by analysis. She must keep up the idea of relation by requiring the use of all the elements of the original whole in each object produced. She must show that unused material is wasted material, must encourage neatness and accuracy through care to build on the squares of the table, and must strengthen continuity of thought and imply the connection of things, by leading from the building of isolated objects to the development of sequences, in which each form grows out of the form that precedes and hints the form which follows it. She must help the child to say in words what he has said in material forms, lead him to name and describe what he has made, and connect each object produced with his life and sympathies. She must, from time to time, concentrate the activity of different children on a common end, and again, she must, through stories and songs, organize their independent creations into a connected whole. She must not impair originality by too constant direction, neither must she suffer freedom to run into license. As the artist is not enslaved, but helped by the laws of artistic creation, so the young mind is not limited, but developed by wise guidance. The felt need of the child must, however, determine the help given, as

all through life our realized lacks open our hearts to sympathy and suggestion.

Through analysis of their productions the children are slowly awakened to facts of form and relations of number, and led to the clear and precise use of language. As they grow older the analysis becomes more definite and extended, and whereas the baby beginners only name the objects they produce, the more advanced children tell how they make each object, and the graduating class must be able to resolve whatever they create into its elements, and state the facts of form, number, direction and relation which it illustrates. I consider this final stage very important, for the reason that it makes clear to the mind the meaning of all its experiences, and leads from the particular fact to the principle governing all the facts of the given class.

With children who have completed the pure Kindergarten course, the gifts may be profitably used to teach the rudiments of geometry and arithmetic. The geometric forms are first recognized, then sought under their veiled manifestations in nature, then applied in construction, then consciously produced, clearly analyzed and sharply defined, and finally shown in their relations to each other. Thus the child who begins by simply calling his building blocks "cubes," will end by recognizing in his cube, the solid, the polyhedron, the hexahedron, the prism and the parallelopiped, and will comprehend its precise definition as a rectangular parallelopiped whose faces are equal squares. So, beginning by pointing out the square corners of his cube, he ends with the definite conception of a right angle as produced when "two straight lines meet each other so as to make the adjacent angles equal." All the simple problems of geometry may be illustrated to perception and grasped as matters of fact, and the mind thus be prepared for the geometrical reasoning of later years.

It is unnecessary to enlarge upon the evident adaptation of the gifts to the teaching of arithmetic. Infinitely varied exercises in counting, and in the four fundamental rules, may be given with the sticks, while the divided solids offer striking illustrations of fractional parts-halves, quarters and eighths must grow clear through the right use of the third and fourth gifts, while the fifth and sixth lead on, in their natural division, to thirds, ninths and twenty-sevenths, and may also be used to illustrate halves, quarters, sixths and twelfths. The salient features of the method are, first, to excite interest in the relations of numbers rather than to give mechanical drill; second, to constantly associate number and form, making them mutually illustrative; third, to apply numbers to mechanical and artistic production. Whereas in the Kindergarten proper the child abstracted from his productions numerical facts, he now directly seeks in his constructions to solve numerical problems. To illustrate with a given number of blocks the children are required to build a house of stated height, breadth and thickness, with a fixed number of windows and doors of definite dimensions, and

having built it, to calculate its square and cubic contents; with their tablets they make squares, oblongs, rhombs, etc., of different sizes, noting length, breadth and contents, or with their sticks develop symmetrical figures from different mathematical centers, calculating themselves the number of sticks required for each new addition. Gradually they grow capable of abstract exercises, and far from finding vexation in multiplication and madness in fractions, their lessons in arithmetic are to them a delight and an inspiration.

From this imperfect survey of the Gifts let us turn now to the Occupations. These are Perforating, Sewing, Drawing, Intertwining, Weaving, Folding, Cutting, Peas-work, Card-board and Clay Modeling.

The perforating tool is a sharp needle fastened into a wooden handle. Holding this in a perfectly vertical position the child pricks small round holes in paper. Little children are provided with drawings in bold lines, and by perforating these lines produce on the opposite side of the paper a raised outline of the drawn figure. As they grow more expert they produce pictures in relief by delicately perforating the surface between the lines. They also receive paper marked off in squares, and first pricking the corners of these squares and then by careful perforations connecting these corners obtain vertical and horizontal lines of different lengths. These are next united to form figures and as the eye gains accuracy and the hand precision, advance is made to slanting and curved lines and their combinations.

Squared paper perforated only at the corners and outline pictures perforated at distances of about the eighth of an inch give the basis of the sewing exercises. Armed with worsted and an embroidery needle the child connects the corners of the paper and makes various combinations of lines, or carefully re-traces the outlines of pictures. The salient feature in the new occupation is variety of color-and through this simple work the harmonies and contrasts of color may be indicated and the attention directed to the colors of natural objects.

Sewing and pricking culminate in drawing, which again emphasizes both combinations of lines and representation of objects, hinting on the one hand the elements of design and on the other the first principles of artistic reproduction. Beginning by copying the outlines they have laid with sticks, the children advance to reproduction of the figures resulting from combinations of tablets, and from these first to front views, and finally to simple perspective representations of the solids and their transformations. As the first step in drawing is to learn to see correctly, it is evident that all the exercises both in gifts and occupations prepare for the use of pencil and chalk. As the mediation of word and object drawing is of vast importance in its reaction on the mind and as the soul of all technical processes, it is the indispensable basis of industrial education.

The material for intertwining consists of strips of paper of different colors, lengths and widths, which folded lengthwise and plaited accord